murder Straight Up

Chapter One 

Nellie’s frantic barking startled me awake. Trying to ignore her, I pulled the sheet over my head. 

“It’s five thirty,” I complained, as if my little rescue dog cared how early it was. I sat up in bed. Nellie’s barking grew more animated. 

“What do you hear, girl?” I asked. She ceased yipping long enough for me to hear what got her attention. Someone was outside. I looked out the window. Whoever it was must have been in the shadows, away from the single streetlight that illuminated the Feisty Goat parking lot. As Nellie pawed at the door, I found my pair of jeans from the day before and a T-shirt from the laundry pile and hastily dressed to investigate. Normally, I would have been more cautious about dashing out first thing in the morning to confront someone lurking about, but there was nothing normal about being suddenly awakened by a frantic dog before the sun rose. My brain was still a couple hours away from its first dose of steaming hot coffee. Nellie let out a soft, short whine. It was her way of reminding me that her desire to go downstairs and investigate was becoming more urgent.

“I’m trying, little girl,” I muttered, looking for the leash and retracing my steps from when we had returned to the apartment after the previous evening’s walk. We had come inside, I took her leash off, I put my water bottle in the… I opened the refrigerator and saw the leash next to the water bottle. Nellie ran to me, then back to the door, pawing at it to encourage me to hurry it up. As we neared the bottom of the stairs leading out of my apartment and down the side of Gram’s bar, the Feisty Goat, Nellie lunged forward, pulling me off balance. I tumbled forward and landed on my knee.

If someone was lurking about, I was providing quite the show. 

“Are you okay?” I recognized the voice coming from the shadows. Michael Sheba, my high school boyfriend and the veterinarian who had helped patch Nellie up, was out for his morning jog. Nellie rushed up to him, and he knelt down to scratch her ears. 

“I’m fine,” I said, trying my best to stand as gracefully as I could with a skinned knee. “Nellie must have been excited to come out and say hi.” 

“Your little girl has healed up nicely.” His voice still gave me the same butterflies in my stomach as it had when we were seventeen. 

“Thanks to the best vet in town,” I replied. “How are you doing?” We talked for a couple minutes, then he looked at me with a curious expression.

“I didn’t wake you up, did I?” he asked.

“No, Nellie did,” I said. “She must have heard you.” Michael shifted his feet in the gravel.

“I’m sorry,” he replied. “I got a little worn out from the jog and stopped in the parking lot to walk around for a minute. I’m surprised she heard me.” 

“She was excited to see you again,” I said nodding towards the dog, who was happily sitting next to Michael, looking at him adoringly with her tongue hanging out the side of her mouth. He picked up her leash and handed it to me. 

“Next time, I’ll come by at a more reasonable hour to visit her,” he said with a grin. After he jogged off, I took Nellie for her morning walk. I doubted either of us would have been able to go back to sleep. 

I limped behind her to her favorite spot, a patch of wild grass past the bar’s rear parking lot. Nellie took her time, sniffing her way through the grass, trying to find the perfect spot to perform her morning routine.  

The Feisty Goat always seemed so odd in the early morning. Hours earlier, laughter, music and the clinking of bar glasses had reverberated through the warm night air, but in the early morning, the bar sat empty and dark with only the pungent smell of beer to remind the outside world of the previous night’s good times. Even though Maple Creek was a popular tourist stop, drawing people from across the country for the area’s camping and fishing, the Feisty Goat was a locals’ bar, well off the beaten path away from the town’s bait shops, rafting companies, gift shops, and cafés. Of course Grams would always welcome anyone who came through the doors, local or not, as long as they observed the Feisty Goat’s two cardinal rules: Have fun and don’t be a horse’s backside. The Feisty Goat also prided itself on the one thing that set it apart from every other bar in the country. Other bars had their steady stream of regulars; the Feisty Goat served Maple Creek’s irregulars, the colorful cast of characters who made up the soul of the town. They showed up night after night, and Grams was their ringleader. 

When Nellie and I went back upstairs to the apartment, I saw my reflection in the door’s window. There was something funny on the collar of my shirt. The tag. I had put my T-shirt on inside out. And backwards. And Michael, being the gentleman he was, said nothing. 

I brewed a quick cup of coffee, took a shower, and worked on a painting before driving over to Grams’ condo for breakfast. My knee still stung from the morning’s fall, although I had to admit it stung less than Michael seeing me at my not-so-best first thing in the morning. He was motivated enough to go for a jog, and I couldn’t manage a set of stairs. Or the intricacies of a T-shirt. Go me. 

Nellie and I arrived at Grams’ condo at ten minutes before eight, in accordance with our new tradition since I had returned to Maple Creek. Grams has breakfast ready to go at eight on the dot. She had always been exacting about time. When I was growing up, breakfast had been at six on school days, eight on weekends. Since I didn’t have to go to school now, breakfast was at eight. Not one minute after eight or one minute before. Exactly at eight.  

As she moved the scrambled eggs from the skillet onto two plates and buttered slices of toast made from the homemade bread she’d picked up at the market, Grams told me about last night’s big story at the bar. She and the rest of the Feisty Goat crowd decided to hold a surprise birthday party for Spider, one of the bar’s two resident bikers. He had turned fifty the day before and wasn’t too happy about the milestone. His friend Dave, the bar’s second resident biker, told Grams that Spider had been in a funk about getting older for the previous two months. So with Grams’ help, Dave and the Feisty Goat irregulars had hatched a plan to help Spider launch his fiftieth year in this world in style.

“Walkers,” Grams bragged as she sat down at the breakfast table. 

“Walkers?” I asked. She grinned and nodded. “Everyone at the bar had to get around using walkers to celebrate Spider’s birthday.” My facial expression must have betrayed my surprise. And horror. 

“Spider is upset about turning fifty, and you celebrate his birthday by having everyone hobble around the bar with walkers?” I asked. 

“Of course,” Grams replied. “Some people put tennis balls on their walkers to give them a more realistic effect. Francis even baked a cake in the shape of a tombstone! It was a riot.” 

“Is Spider in therapy this morning?” I asked, not quite believing what I was hearing. 

“Are you kidding?” Grams laughed, slapping her hand on her knee. “He’s got to be the happiest hombre in Maple Creek today.” I tilted my head like Nellie does when she doesn’t understand what I’m saying. Grams leaned forward on the table. “When Spider came into the bar, I told him if he thinks he’s an old fart, his friends at the bar were going to be old farts too. That’s how much everyone loves him. But if he wants to celebrate like he’s still got a lot of kick in him, we’d be happy to put the walkers away and have a good time.” 

“Grams?” 

“Yes.” 

“Where did you find enough walkers for everyone at the bar?” 

“One shouldn’t concern herself with such questions,” she replied, waving a hand as if she were shooing away my query. “Knowing the answer to that wouldn’t make one bit of difference in your life.” She capped off Spider’s birthday celebration with a Starlight Cruise, taking however many people could fit in her 1972 yellow Cadillac convertible and driving through Maple Creek after the Feisty Goat closed. 

“We drove out to Mill Road singing “Let’s Get It Started” at the top of our lungs,” Grams said with a cackle. 

“By the Black Eyed Peas?” I asked. 

“Of course,” Grams replied. “It’s a great song.” 

That night there was going to be another party at the Feisty Goat, she informed me. She and her friends would come up with different themed parties that lured people from Maple Creek and all the nearby towns a couple times a month. Once, she had hired a dance instructor to teach people how to cha-cha. She had also organized a tango night to coincide with a Taco Tuesday.

The next theme was going to be a mystery night. Grams showed me her Sherlock Holmes costume, complete with a long-stem pipe. Her friends, the women her age who conspired with her to live life to the fullest, would be dressed like Watson, Professor Moriarty, and other villains. 

“That sounds like fun,” I said. 

“You should ask your friend Lynn if she can join us,” Grams suggested. “If she can get away from the inn for an evening.” 

“I think she’d enjoy that,” I said. “I’ll ask her when I see her this morning.”  

After we ate, Grams said she had to take care of my knee. Sometimes I was sure she still thought I was ten instead of thirty-two. She peroxided the scrape, put some antiseptic on it, then put a big, padded band-aid across the top. I probably acted like I was only ten when she put the peroxide on. That stuff stung. 

As my grandmother nursed my knee back to health, she excitedly told me about the night’s murder mystery theater plans. Dinner was either cheeseburgers, tacos, or nachos—not quite Victorian England fare, but it was what the bar had. 

“Haven’t you had enough of murders lately?”

“This one isn’t real,” Grams said, rolling her eyes. “No one is actually going to end up dead tonight.”

“Don’t jinx it.”

“There hasn’t been a murder in this town for more than a hundred years.”

“Except for the last one.”

Grams nodded and gave me a stern look. “You must have brought that crime stuff back with you from New York.”

From the way Grams spoke about large cities, one would get the impression she was afraid of them. In reality, there was very little that actually scared her. She had, in fact, lived in larger cities during her life and even visited New York on more than one occasion. The last time had been to see Cats on Broadway. 

“I sneezed through the whole performance,” she always joked. Grams took issue with big cities, but not in the way most people imagined. She was a woman who made a point of standing out. She had cultivated a reputation of being a little on the crazy side, and a reputation like that doesn’t come easy when everyone, even the crazy people, blend into the crowd.

“You’re right, Grams,” I said. “Before I moved back, I collected a jar of Manhattan air and opened it when I arrived in Maple Creek. Bam. A crime wave.” She looked at me and shook her head. 

“Now you’re the one being crazy,” she said. 

After breakfast, Nellie and I went for another walk. Her injured leg had healed, but it still seemed stiff. She had been walking on three legs and steadying herself with the fourth since the vet had released her. We strolled along the river, her favorite walk. She carefully cataloged all the day’s smells with a look of determination and focus. To call our outings walks would be an overstatement. They were gradual migrations from one interesting scent to the next. Something that morning excited Nellie, though, and she turned and jumped on me, dragging her muddy front paws down my T-shirt and jeans. I had begun to think her limp was nothing more than a ruse to get extra attention and sympathy. 

I looked down at my shirt. It was unwearable in public. I should have known better than to wear white anything. White on me had always been a magnet for all things messy. 

“Thanks to you, I have a new painting shirt,” I told Nellie. Nothing went better with muddy paw stains than a rainbow of acrylic and oil paints. Unconcerned about my T-shirt problem, Nellie got the zooms, splashing in the river, then dashing around in circles like a child who’d had far too much sugar. 

She snuggled into her doggy bed once we got home. Between the walk by the river and the bit of bacon and some scrambled eggs Grams gave her, she was satisfied and sleepy. 

Watching Nellie curled up on her side, sleeping with her front paws stretched out in front of her face, which had completely melted into her pillow, I was tempted to go back to sleep. But I needed to complete a couple more paintings to restock my work at the Maple Creek Inn. Since I’d moved back, I had sold a lot of artwork to tourists passing through on their way to and from the beach. Plus, almost every business in town had at least one of my paintings. I didn’t know if it was because the people in town truly liked my art, if they were simply supporting a local artist, or because they were afraid of—I mean inspired by—Grams. It could have been all the above. 

I finished my latest paining, an impressionistic view of Miller’s Pond, a scenic retreat tucked away in the mountains about a half hour from Maple Creek. If someone had told me ten years ago that I would have been painting landscapes and selling them to tourists, I would have either laughed or thrown a punch. That wasn’t why I had attended art school in New York. The younger me had left Maple Creek to chase my dreams of creating art that made a statement. I had dreamed of having hordes of collectors and critics at each of my openings. It was funny how life made other plans. What really surprised me, however, was how little I cared. I could always paint landscapes, and many times I would sketch a scene simply to relax. I realized I didn’t need overpriced galleries to carry my work to be appreciated. I didn’t need critics. People enjoyed my work and wanted to hang it on their walls. That meant a lot to me. 

I set the painting aside to let it dry, then wrapped up two completed paintings to take to the Maple Creek Inn, owned by my best friend from high school, Lynn Ross. She sold my work in her little gift shop. 

“Have you heard from Roger yet?” Lynn asked as we ate lunch. It was still a sore subject for me. Who wanted to be reminded of the boyfriend who disappeared without any explanation, just a note left on the kitchen table saying the rent was paid for the next six months? 

“No,” I muttered. “I’m pretty sure I won’t.”

“Perhaps he was kidnapped by aliens,” she quipped as she shrugged. I shook my head and sighed. 

“Believe it or not, we actually joked about that,” I said. “Roger said alien abductions never happen in New York; it would be too hard to park a flying saucer, and the cost would be outrageous.”

I changed the subject and asked her if she wanted to see my new paintings. 

She loved them and said she thought they would sell well. 

I was glad to hear that. My art was my only source of income besides working at Grams’ bar. As much as I loved working with my grandmother, my heart was in my painting. I also felt like a child working for my parents who gave me jobs so I would have enough money to get something special.

Lynn and I talked about the next paintings I had in mind. She thought they would sell and gave me some ideas of different scenes that I could include in the series. 

“I really like the one you did with….” 

A shrill scream interrupted her.

She jumped, knocking over her soda. The dining room fell quiet as everyone waited to hear what would happen next. 

Lynn and I pushed back our chairs and ran up the stairs, where we saw the maid, Jennifer, backing out of Room 211. She was wide eyed and pale, not taking her eyes off something in the room. She had backed across the hallway and jumped as she bumped into the wall. 

“What’s wrong?” Lynn asked, panting from our sprint.

Jennifer tried to speak as she pointed a trembling finger toward the room. 

Lynn and I looked in at the same time and saw a man on the bed. His eyes were shut, and his hands were by his side. His dark brown hair was nicely combed. Nothing looked out of the ordinary except that he was dressed in a black suit and polished shoes. Who goes to bed with a suit, tie, and shoes on? I thought. Once we got closer, we could see that his lips had a blue tint. There was no rise and fall to his chest. His necktie was tight around his neck, the knot snug under his chin.

I tried to loosen his tie. It was so tight I couldn’t get the knot loose. I had to use my pocketknife to cut it, praying that I didn’t cut his neck as I did. Once his tie was off, I started CPR on him. I was pretty sure it wasn’t going to work, since his lips were already blue, but his body was still warm to the touch. I hoped there was a chance. 

A crowd of people pressed against the doorway to see what was going on, although I didn’t see Jennifer among the group. I didn’t have time to think about that, though, as I yelled, “Someone call 911!”

As I did the chest compressions, I noticed red marks on the man’s neck. He had been strangled. Lynn dialed 911 on the room phone. The operator assured her that the ambulance was on the way. She set the phone on the nightstand and started to help me. It seemed like it took forever for the paramedics to arrive.

They took over, but after a few minutes, they said he was dead. The Maple Creek Inn had just become a crime scene.