Coastal Corpse Read online

  Rising to my feet, I peered out the front window—just to make certain Anita wasn’t making a late appearance in the parking lot. No sign of her recently acquired Buick Century with the crooked bumper (she’d backed into someone months ago and never had it fixed). I was an amateur “car shrink” with, if I say so myself, an uncanny ability to psychoanalyze people according to the type of vehicle they drove. Anita’s ramshackle Buick spoke volumes about her lack of interest in status (and poor depth perception).

  Giving the lot one last sweeping glance, I smiled. The coast was clear, so to speak.

  I tiptoed into Anita’s office, weaving a crooked path around the stacks of ancient Observer newspapers, out-of-date phone books (who keeps those in this age of Facebook and Twitter?), and used Official Reporter Notepads. Some of the paper products were so old, the pages had yellowed and curled on the corners. Aside from Anita’s other charming qualities, she possessed the “packrat” gene.

  When I reached the dented, metal, L-shaped desk, I began to rifle through the heaps of junk on top. Broken stapler. My nail file that had disappeared a month ago. A copy of Weight Watchers magazine in which Sandy had pasted her own face on the cover model—one of her sweetly funny weight-loss techniques—except that Anita had drawn a mustache on her. Jeez.

  I kept digging, but no assignment sheets turned up.

  Baffled, I checked the top drawer and found only two unused jars of bee cream (but that’s another story: check out Killer Kool), one of which I pocketed as payment for the loss of my nail file. Scanning the bookcase, I turned up a moldy cheese sandwich and crumpled Kleenex.

  What a pig sty.

  Frustrated and empty-handed, I spied a manila envelope taped to Anita’s phone; she’d scrawled my name on it.

  Cautiously, I opened it, sliding out a small piece of paper with a handwritten note:

  Mallie:

  Benton and I decided to elope last night; we’re going to honeymoon in Detroit, so he can see the steel mills where I grew up.

  How romantic.

  I won’t be at work all week, so you’re in charge while I’m gone. Don’t screw up.

  Anita Benton.

  My mouth dropped open.

  Was it possible? Anita married the middle-aged cheapo owner of the newspaper, the guy who had a pot belly and ear hair and the first dollar he ever earned?

  Then, an even more disturbing thought occurred to me: I’m in charge.

  My legs gave out and I collapsed into Anita’s desk chair. One of the wheels promptly fell off, and the chair tilted to one side, causing me to tumble onto the floor—still clutching the letter.

  I hit the hard surface with a thud.

  After I hyperventilated under Anita’s desk for a short while (and scarfed down an unopened Snickers bar that had fallen on the floor), I fantasized madly about packing up my Airstream and teacup poodle and heading to Key West. It was the southernmost point of the U.S., and about as far south as I could go and still remain in the country. Cheeseburger in paradise territory and the last stop on the Mallie Express to Freedom. There was just one problem: I had a life here, including a newly acquired fiancé. Giving myself a quick mental shake, I vowed that I wouldn’t run away under any circumstances.

  But I needed help—fast.

  Stumbling into the main office, I called Cole; he didn’t answer. Then, I speed-dialed my great-aunt Lily, the doyenne of Coral Island; my call went straight to voice mail. In desperation, I punched in Sandy’s number with a shaky hand.

  “Hi, Mallie,” she sang out. “You’ll never guess where we are right now: a romantic horse-drawn carriage that looks like something out of a fairy tale—”

  “Thank goodness you picked up, Sandy,” I cut in with a rush of relief. “I’m sorry to call when you’re still on your honeymoon, but I came into the office this morning, and no one was here. You know how Anita is always at her desk at the crack of dawn—but not today. I waited and waited, then some woman came in about a plant killer, but she was a nutcase. Anyway, I went into Anita’s office and found a note—” I broke off, realizing that the shock had driven my motor mouth into hyperdrive.

  “She didn’t . . . fire you?” Sandy’s tone turned up a notch in seriousness and volume, but I could still hear the steady, reassuring clip-clop of horse hoofs in the background.

  “No—worse. She and Benton . . . eloped,” I barely managed to eke out the words without getting nauseous.

  “What?” Sandy screamed. The horse whinnied.

  Wincing, I jerked the phone away from my ear.

  “You’ve got to be kidding me.” She lowered her voice a notch. “I mean—they hung out a while back at the Twin Palms, and I’d heard they were spotted at that dumpy restaurant, Le Sink, but . . . married?”

  “It’s true,” I responded, pressing the phone back to the side of my head. “And it gets even more bizarre: She left me in charge.”

  “No way.”

  “Oh, yeah—way.” I echoed her disbelief. “I’ve got to do interviews and write the stories for this week; then, I’ll need to edit copy for the whole paper—and make certain we don’t lose any advertisers. Cripes, I’m breaking out in hives just thinking about it.” My skin tended to react to everything: the sun, the moon—and especially emotional stress. If not blotchy, red patches, I could feel a hundred new freckles break out across my face, and I already had a humongous amount of them on my forehead, cheeks, and chin.

  “Stay calm,” Sandy advised, regaining the composure in her voice. “Jimmy, could you please have the driver stop the horse, so I can think?”

  “Sure thing, sweetheart.” Jimmy’s voice answered in the background and, instantly, the sound of the horse hoofs ceased.

  A twinge of guilt nagged at me over interrupting the newlyweds, but this was survival. Still clutching the cell phone, I seated myself again at my desk and did a couple of deep breathing techniques and my “muggatoni mantra” that I’d learned in Tae Kwon Do classes. It was my calming chant, my salvation in times of stress, and one of my favorite pastas. It worked—sort of. At least, I didn’t feel like I was going to pass out. The sense of imminent doom lingered, though.

  “Mallie? Are you with me?” Sandy said.

  “Barely.” I leaned my head back and closed my eyes briefly.

  “That’s a start. Okay, here’s what you do: check the Observer’s archive for last year’s editions for this time of year and see what stories you covered. That way, you’ve got a starting point for this week’s articles that cycle every year.”

  “Great idea,” I enthused—then paused, scratching my head. “Why didn’t I think of that?”

  “You’re still in shock over Anita and Benton—it boggles the mind.” I could feel her virtual shudder across the miles.

  “All right, back to business: review the community calendar and the assignment sheets filed online from last year. After that, you need to get in a temp to help you with the proofs—”

  “A copy editor?”

  “Get real.” She gave a short laugh. “You work for a weekly paper that pays minimum wage—hardly enough for a photocopy. But ask around and maybe you’ll find someone willing to help out with reading the proofs.”

  Clicking on the Internet Yellow Pages, I felt a tiny glow of hope stir inside of me. “Which temp service do you use?”

  “Service?” Another laugh; this time it sounded more like a chortle. “Start calling anyone who’s ever freelanced for us—and beg, beg, beg.” The horse whinnied again. Maybe he could write an equine exposé.

  I was officially losing it.

  “Call Mom,” Jimmy urged. “She’s a terrific writer.”

  I almost gagged. Aside from being the island’s phony freelance psychic, Madame Geri wrote our monthly Astrology Now! column—but that hardly qualified her as a journalist. “I can’t call her—she’s trouble with a capital T. After all the tight spots and near disasters she’s got me involved in outside of work, God knows what would happen if she were actually working in the
office.” Actually, “tight spots” was an understatement; Madame Geri almost caused my death several times with her pushing me to act on her half-baked predictions. “Give me some other names of possible temps.”

  “Easier said than done.” Sandy paused. “When you’re asking for the ability to write a complete sentence, it kinda thins the pool.”

  “Think!”

  “Madame Geri is your only choice, unless . . .” She paused again, this time longer. “I’ve got a brilliant idea, but you probably won’t like it.”

  “I’m hanging by a thread here—”

  “How ’bout Anita’s sister, Bernice?”

  I grimaced.

  “Before you say anything, remember she ran the Observer when Anita took off on vacation—”

  “Poorly,” I said, gritting my teeth as the memories of Bernice’s short tenure as editor came back to me.

  “Come on. She managed the paper for a week, and it didn’t fold. Aside from her obsession with selling advertising, she wasn’t half bad doing Anita’s job.”

  “Are you kidding? She used to call me ‘Miss Priss’ when I wouldn’t wear tacky t-shirts with our advertisers’ names on them. Give me a break. I’m a journalist and shouldn’t have had to wear an ‘Eat Me at The Frozen Flamingo’ t-shirt.”

  “Think of her as . . . ‘eccentric’.” Sandy added something under her breath to Jimmy that I couldn’t make out.

  “Hah.” The only good thing I could say about Bernice was, unlike my skinny, leathery boss, she’d never smoked. That’s something, I guess.

  “Come on, give her a try,” Sandy urged.

  We continued to argue as I lifted my gaze to the ceiling in futile hope for divine intervention.

  As if on cue, Madame Geri strolled through the door with her turquoise parrot, Marley, on her shoulder. My eyes widened as I took in her houndstooth, retro, fitted jacket and skirt, complemented by her grayish dreadlocks tucked into a fifties’-style fedora. She looked like a combo of Rosalind Russell and Madonna—a new age “Girl Friday” who was Desperately Seeking Sanity.

  “I’m here to help,” she pronounced.

  “You called her,” I hissed in the cell phone at Sandy and Jimmy. That’s what Sandy had been murmuring to Jimmy. “Traitors!”

  “Au contraire.” Madame Geri tipped her brim. “The spirit world contacted me to let me know you were all alone in the office, panicked—with death and disaster on the way.”

  I raised my brows in disbelief on both counts.

  A flattering comparison, indeed.

  “It doesn’t matter why I came here. The important thing is I’m ready to take on my first big story.” She produced a mini-laptop and dog-eared book from her black, faux-alligator bag: The Dummy’s Guide to Journalism. “And, by the by, the spirit world never makes a mistake: you can be sure that a death is imminent, and I’m going to write about it.”

  Journalism 101 just hit the skids.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Okay, let me explain,” I began, working hard to maintain my patience after Sandy and Jimmy’s betrayal. “Journalists write stories on events that have actually happened—with verifiable sources. And the ‘spirit world’ doesn’t qualify as a ‘source’.”

  “Oh, it’s going to happen all right, whether you believe it or not,” she responded matter-of-factly, flipping through her Dummy’s Guide.

  “The answer is—no.” Easing back in my chair with a careful balancing over the wheels, I folded my hands in a pyramid shape over my lap. “Do you have anything concrete for me?”

  “Oh, yeah. I’ve got a great lead on a front-page item that will do nicely until the real action starts with the murder.”

  “Look, I’ve already heard about herbicide this morning, so I guess your story can’t be any worse . . . until the upcoming homicide occurs, of course—pardon my sarcasm.”

  “Three cheers for Madame Geri, who’s going to save the Observer.” Sandy’s shout erupted from my cell phone. I’d forgotten that it was open and, instantly, snapped the device shut.

  “What’s the ‘scoop’?” I asked, bracing myself.

  She slipped a four-by-six color photo out of the Guide and held it in front of my face.

  I studied the image of a tattooed, spiky-haired young guy holding up what appeared to be some kind of dilapidated . . . violin with a faded finish and missing strings.

  “So?”

  “Can’t you see it?” She pointed at the musical instrument in the picture. “The image of Abraham Lincoln is imprinted on the violin—right above the chin rest,” she explained, her index finger tracing what appeared to be a series of circular scratches on the old wood. “You can clearly make out Abe’s gaunt cheeks, the beard, and the sad expression. It’s a historical miracle!”

  I squinted. “Just don’t see it.”

  “Not even the famous stovepipe hat?” She rapped the picture repeatedly. “You can’t tell me that isn’t clear—”

  “As mud,” I quipped, still trying to detect the Great Emancipator’s features. All I could make out was a bunch of squiggly scratches. “Maybe I need glasses, but a violin with some funny marks on it isn’t exactly front-page headline material.”

  “Maybe you should go right to bifocals.” Madame Geri lowered the picture with a shake of her head.

  “Just because I can’t see an imaginary outline of Abe Lincoln on a beat-up violin?”

  “Bite your tongue about the sixteenth president of the United States,” she warned, her tone upping a notch in volume, which caused Marley to flutter his wings. I kept a wary eye on that bird; he didn’t like me, and I didn’t like him. Mutual disdain. “Joe Earl Chapman bought the violin off eBay—it was listed as an ‘artifact’ by a certified music historian in Boston.”

  “More like certifiable,” I muttered under my breath as I kept my distance from Marley’s long talons. “Unless I heard Abe Lincoln himself say it was his picture, I wouldn’t believe it.”

  “Okay, I’ll verify it,” she said, her mouth curving into a smug smile as she stroked the parrot. I swear he purred.

  “Please don’t tell me that you’re in actual communication with Old Abe?”

  “None other—and he’s a great man, even in death.” She closed her eyes and began humming.

  “Stop!” I jerked forward in my chair and held up my hands in defeat. “Do the story on the violin, but I don’t want to hear any more talk about communing with Lincoln right here in the Observer office; it’s creeping me out.”

  Her eyes flew open and the humming ceased. “No problema. I’ll get started on the interview with Joe Earl right away.” She seated herself at Sandy’s desk and transferred Marley to a temporary perch on the stack of bridal magazines that Sandy had left in the office. As soon as the beady-eyed bird was settled with a last tender pat, Madame Geri cracked open the Dummy’s Guide again. “First, I’ll read up on ‘The Ten Tips to a Front-page Feature,’ and, then, I’ll call Joe Earl.”

  I opened my mouth to remind her to take interview notes, but my cell phone rang, and I turned my attention to the number: Sandy the Traitor. I let the call go to voice mail.

  “I like Tip Number One.” Madame Geri rubbed her chin meditatively. “It suggests citing a classic quote in the article’s first paragraph . . . I think I’ll use the Emancipation Proclamation. That’s a winner.”

  “Sounds good.” What was the point in giving my new “reporter” any advice? She’d do what she wanted no matter what I said. I’d let her write the story, and then I’d edit the hell (and craziness) out of it.

  Yikes. I was starting to sound like . . . Anita.

  Quickly, I turned back to my computer and scanned through the Observer articles from last November. Something else had to turn up—I couldn’t rely on a bogus Lincoln violin for newspaper copy.

  After an hour of wading through the mush of last year’s autumn-themed stories, I found nothing more exciting than a “Growing Greens” gardening workshop led by a woman who harvested herbs out of carved pumpk
ins. I didn’t even remember writing it.

  Resting my chin on my hand, I fixated on the computer screen with a sinking feeling that the certified Old Abe violin might really end up being front-page material this week. Unbelievable. Needless to say, Anita would have my hide when she returned, if that’s all I’d managed to eke out for a headline. Not only would I have to wave bye-bye to my new title of Senior Reporter, I wouldn’t have a chance in hell of ever being in charge of more than the office deli order in the future.

  I opened my desk drawer and checked on the engagement ring, which still rested quietly amid the paperclips and Post-Its. A good thing, too, because I might end up as a stay-at-home bride if I couldn’t get out a good edition of the Observer this week.

  “Anita won’t fire you,” Madame Geri commented as she clicked the keys on her laptop, nestled her cell phone between her right ear and shoulder, and kept the Dummy’s Guide propped open with the elbow.

  Who knew she could multi-task like the Wizard of Oz? Even more importantly, how could she read my thoughts like that?

  Then again, it might have something to do with my doodling pictures of myself with a hangman’s noose around my neck, along with the caption “Please don’t let Anita fire me.”

  “Hang tough, Mallie.”

  “Sure.” I began scrolling through last year’s Observer’s stories one more time.

  She hitched the cell phone closer to her mouth. “Hi, Joe Earl. This is Madame Geri, and I need your help. I’m filling in as a temporary reporter at the Observer and wanted to write a story about your famous violin. I know you’re probably slammed with your online business, but could you spare some time for an interview—”

  “Eureka!” I exclaimed.

  Madame Geri lowered the phone. “Pipe down, please.”

  “I can’t believe that I overlooked something right in front of my face. It must be the trauma of being left in charge.” I raised my hands, palms up, in triumph. “It’s town-council election year. That’s our front-page news!”

  She covered the bottom of her cell phone with her fingers. “A small-time island election is hardly in the same category as the Abe Lincoln Violin. Get your priorities straight, Mallie.” She emphasized each of the last three words with disdain. “Joe Earl’s story might even go national if we do it right.”