Die Charred, page 18
In addition to being the town’s matchmaker, Ms. Burger once found a severed head in a lobster tank, and she claims that she can predict the weather.
Chapter 1
My name’s Matilda Dare, and I might see dead people. I mean, after they’re buried and gone. I also have a problem with encountering more than my fair share of killers.
I didn’t know any of that when I started my new life in Goodnight, New Mexico. I had only had one up close and personal killer up until that point, and I may or may not have brought a dead woman back to life. But boy, was that about to change.
I had left my old life behind two weeks ago, and I was now the owner of a large house, which included the headquarters of the Goodnight Gazette, two ancient dogs, and enough money to fix the plumbing and electricity and keep the paper running for three months. After that, I was going to have to sell pencils in town to survive.
But, I’m an optimist. So, after I arrived in town and was greeted by the four-person staff of the Goodnight Gazette like I was goose-stepping down the Champs Élysées and they were the French resistance, they informed me that I now owned the place, which was headquartered in my house, I heard myself say, “I plan on making a go of the paper,” which surprised the hell out of me. The newspaper was totally unexpected, but it answered the question of what I was going to do in New Mexico. It’s always good to know what one is going to do when starting a new life.
“Yeah? You’re going to make a go?” Silas Miller, the head reporter, challenged me, while I still held the handle of my suitcase in my hand. “Do you know that the Gazette has never made a profit?”
“Nothing in Goodnight makes a profit,” Klee Johnson, the managing editor, added.
“The diner does pretty well,” Jack the paperboy said.
“That’s true,” Klee said. “I do love their smoked trout hash.”
“Best green chili in town,” Silas agreed. “But nothing else makes money here.”
“How does the paper stay in business?” I asked. Klee shrugged, and it set off a wave of shoulders rising. “Well, that doesn’t matter,” I announced and broke out into panic-induced hives. “I believe in the importance of a free press in a democracy. So, this will be a go.”
I made a silent prayer that there would be a major earthquake, which would create a large crevice that would open in the earth to swallow me up. But then I remembered that I wasn’t in California anymore. So, I prayed for a fire. But God wasn’t cooperating. Instead of sending me a natural disaster, he sent me a financial disaster.
Luckily, just then the paper got a call about a possible UFO sighting over the fracking fields west of town, and the focus moved from me to Martians. Then, I found my room, left to me from a dead relative I never knew I had, and took four Xanax while I scrubbed and cleaned and organized before I went to bed with a couple tiny bottles of booze, which I had taken from the mini fridge at a motel in Phoenix on my way to Goodnight.
But, of course, I didn’t sleep. I hadn’t slept since I was a teenager. I was hoping that the fresh, mountain air would help, but it didn’t. Instead, in addition to not being able to sleep, I couldn’t seem to get a lungful of air, no matter how much I tried.
Later, Klee told me that I had altitude sickness and that it would go away in a couple of months. “If you last that long,” she added, like she wasn’t at all convinced.
She had warmed up since then. In my experience, neat freak insomniacs are hard to love, but we’re great landlords. In two weeks, I had scrubbed the living quarters from the floors up to the ceilings and planted flowers in the courtyard. Klee approved. She also liked that I left the Gazette in her hands. It was her territory, and I knew better than to invade.
Little did she know that I planned on victory by attrition, earning my ownership with tiny, imperceptible steps. I was an all or nothing kind of person, but I always seemed to choose all instead of nothing.
In my zeal and tendency to lean toward the extremes, I usually failed in my efforts. But not this time. This time, I was determined to live happily ever after. Especially after what I had gone through back in California.
That’s why I sat in on the morning editorial meeting for the first time that Monday, and that’s how it all started. My new life. And love, too. If I had been satisfied to leave well enough alone and leave journalism for the journalists, it might have all turned out differently. There would have been no adventures. I would never have found my place. And the rest. Well, the rest would have happened, but I would have never known about it.
The house was made of mud plaster, one-story cut into a square of four wings with a courtyard in the middle. The Gazette’s offices were in the front section of the house. I walked in past Klee’s desk and sat by the wall, next to two desks that were pushed together. Those belonged to Silas and the junior reporter, Jimmy Sanchez, a thin young man who was convinced that he was better than all this and was destined to make it to The Washington Post. The paperboy was in school and so wasn’t at the meeting.
“What’re you doing here?” Silas demanded. “Figuring out what to do with this space when you shut us down?”
As far as I could tell, Silas only had one suit, which he wore every day. It was a greenish brown with a stain on the lapel. He had two button-down shirts, both short-sleeved. I figured they used to be white, but that ship sailed a long time ago. His tie was pulled loose so that his top shirt button could rest undone. He was sitting with his legs outstretched, resting on his desk, crossed at the ankle, giving me a good look at the bottoms of his shoes. He wore old-fashioned, brown Hush Puppies slip-ons, and the soles were nearly worn through. His desk was piled high with paper with a narrow tunnel for him and his computer.
Jimmy’s desk was bare, with just a computer and not a scrap of paper. On his skinny frame, he wore a tight black suit, which was a couple of inches too short. Klee looked fabulous in flowy slacks and a hand-painted tunic, chunky jewelry, and a handwoven scarf that wound around her neck three times. She was a beautiful older woman with thick, long black hair. Her desk was covered in organization boxes, plastic shelves, and a large phone with a shoulder rest attached to the handset.
“I’m not going to shut you down,” I told Silas for the millionth time. I so wanted to shut them down. The paper was like an albatross around my neck. I had no idea about how to run a newspaper or journalism in general, and I had even less of an idea how to make it profitable. “I’m here to learn. And I’m here to help.”
Silas’s mouth dropped open before it turned into a smile. “You want to help? Hear that Klee? I think we can get some work for the boss. What do you think?”
“I’ve got the reopening of the Goodnight Community Pool at nine,” Klee said, handing me a press release. “How about three hundred words?”
“What? You want me to write?” I asked.
“I heard that you have three PnDs,” she said. I did. They were in Floral Management, Bowling Industry Technology, and Leisure Studies. None of them required writing. And three hundred words? How long was that? Twenty pages? I had no idea. But I did know I couldn’t write twenty pages.
“Three hundred words. No problem,” I said, skimming the one-paragraph announcement about the pool.
“Jimmy, get the woman a glass of water,” Silas ordered. “The boss looks like she’s going to pass out or have a stroke. One or the other.”
Jimmy scowled and went to the water cooler. “I’m fine,” I lied.
“Don’t worry. I’ll walk you through it,” Silas said, surprising me. “If we leave soon, we’ll have an hour at the diner before you have to be at the pool, and I’ll give you the rundown on how to be a reporter.”
Klee handed out the assignments. Jimmy was going to take the “if it bleeds, it leads” beat, and Silas had a list of about ten stories to cover, including a big investigative piece on a petroleum company and water rights.
We headed out at about a quarter to eight, and I followed Silas to the diner in my Altima. I was both nervous and excited about my assignment. I enjoyed tackling something new, but I wished I had more time to learn how to do it.
The diner was a centerpiece in town, but since I had been stuck cleaning at home, I had never eaten there. It was located in the plaza, wedged in between the Goodnight Hat Shop and the Goodnight Porcelain Cat Shop.
I parked behind Silas’s old, gold, four-door Cavalier on the street in front of the diner and walked in with him. He opened the door, which made a ringing sound, and walked in, not bothering to hold it open for me. The diner had booths all along the walls and about five round tables in the center. The kitchen was at the back of the diner with a long open cutout where the cook put the finished meals to be picked up. Everything was clean, but dingy.
The diner was packed with working men, and they all turned to look at me when I entered. Silas waved at a woman about my age and took a seat in a booth by the window. “Adele, get the boss a menu. She’ll probably want one.”
I sat down and took the menu from Adele. “It’s about time you came in,” she said to me. “Nearly everyone in this town is a regular. What’re you doing up in that house? Eating cereal? Nobody can survive on cereal. You’re in Goodnight, now, sweetie. You need eggs. You need tortillas. I know what you need.” She took the menu from me before I had a chance to look at it. “I’m Adele. I know everything that goes on in Goodnight. I know all about your husband in San Quentin, for example. So, you come to me if you need anything. We don’t get a lot of people moving into Goodnight, you know. Not with our bad giraffe karma. And then there’s the nuclear waste. And the fracking’s not fabulous.” She said the last bit in a whisper, eyeing the two tables full of men wearing uniforms with a petroleum company’s logo on them.
“I’m glad a single woman moved in. Not many of us single gals around these parts,” she continued, touching her hair. “I’m a widow, myself.”
“I’m sorry for your loss. That’s tough,” I said. I was in the middle of a divorce to a man who put me away in a rubber room and later tried to kill me, but I thwarted his plans and conked him over the head and turned him in to the police.
Marriage is complicated.
“Doubly tough since I killed him,” Adele said, wiping some lipstick off of her front teeth.
“Excuse me?”
“It’s not what you think. It wasn’t my fault.”
“So, you what? Fed him too much saturated fat?”
“Oh, no. The man ate chicken fried steak every day of his life and had arteries you could drive a truck through. I shot him through the head. That’s how he died. But it wasn’t my fault.”
“Are you done?” Silas asked, irritated. “Are you going to branch off into period talk? Waxing? Natural mineral cosmetics? All day with women it’s yap, yap, yap.”
“All that meanness is going to eat you from the inside out,” Adele spat at Silas. “You’re a mean, mean man. I should have shot you in the head. Don’t worry, you’ll get your food soon enough. Not that you couldn’t survive skipping a few breakfasts.”
“We have work to do,” Silas countered. “The press is under attack. We will not be silenced,” he bellowed.
Adele hit him hard over the head with the menu and walked to the kitchen.
Silas leaned forward and counted on his fingers. “Who, what, where, how, and why. Can you remember that?”
I nodded.
“No! You’re not going to remember that. You’re in the journalism game now, boss. Write down everything. Everything. You get me?”
I nodded.
“No!” he yelled, again. “I gave you a reporter’s notebook. Get it out, now. A reporter is always writing in their notebook. Facts. Write the facts. So, what’re you going to write?”
I pulled the reporter’s notebook out of my purse. “Everything,” I said.
“Good girl. Good boss. Adele! What does a man have to do to get coffee in this dump?”
“A man could ask nicely,” she said and brought the coffee over.
“So, what do I write about at the pool? Do I just watch or should I ask questions?” I asked Silas.
“You watch. You ask questions. And when you’ve got the who, what, where, how, and why figured out, you leave. Then, you write it down in three-hundred words. Lead sentence is the most important. Lead paragraph, second important, until you get down to the I-don’t-give-a-fuck part. Got me, boss?”
“You keep using that boss word, but I don’t think you know what it means.”
Silas punched me in the arm and laughed. “You’re all right, boss.”
Adele put two plates down on our table. “Smoked trout hash with green chilies and sourdough toast,” she announced. “So good, you’ll slap your mama.”
I drove the three blocks to the Goodnight rec center. I was fine when I was sitting down, but every time I took a step, I would gasp for air. Goodnight was set up a lot like Santa Fe with old, squat buildings on short streets around a plaza, but the comparisons ended there. Santa Fe was a rich, vibrant city full of artists. Goodnight was a dying town with a nuclear fallout problem.
Nuclear waste or not, breathing or not, I was feeling optimistic. I was on my way to my first reporting assignment, and it made me feel like I was in control, helping the Gazette become profitable so that my new life could be sustainable. Still, my one-minute journalism class from Silas wasn’t filling me with self-confidence.
“Who, what, where…” I repeated, as I parked on the street. Damn it. I had already forgotten the rest. A woman knocked on the passenger window, and I stepped out of the car.
“Are you from the sheriff’s department?” she asked.
“No. I’m with the Gazette.”
“Oh, that must be why you’re not driving a sheriff’s car. Do you have a gun?” she asked, hopefully. I shook my head. “Oh, well. Mabel has a cattle prod. Normally that would do it, but Norton’s got a few more pounds on him than a bull.”
“I’m here for the pool reopening?” I said like a question.
“Me, too,” she said walking back into the rec center. I followed her. “I’m Nora. I work over at Goodnight Bank. Are you the crazy woman who bought old man Simmons’ house?”
“I inherited it. He was some kind of distant cousin. And I’m not really crazy. My husband gaslighted me and put me away.”
“I heard you ate a live lizard.”
“What?”
It was a small rec center, and we walked through it to the outside where there was a pool and about twenty people standing around holding pool noodles and assorted pool equipment. Everyone was focused on a fracas by the diving board. A tall woman around sixty-years old with a long, narrow nose was pointing a cattle prod at an enormous man wearing a Speedo bathing suit and holding a large, inflatable duck.
“This is a family place!” she yelled at him.
“That’s Mabel,” Nora told me. “And that’s Norton, the one with the duck, and the cleavage.”
“I have a family. I’m a family man, and I want to swim,” Norton countered.
I took my reporter’s notebook and a pen out of my purse. What, where, when, how, and why, I reminded myself. “Is Mabel in charge of the pool?” I asked Nora.
“And the rec center and the library and half of the town.”
“Here I go,” I muttered and clicked my pen, holding it over my notebook. I walked toward Mabel, making sure to keep a safe distance away from her cattle prod. “Hello. I’m Matilda Dare from the Goodnight Gazette. Can you tell me about the pool reopening? Whoa!”
Standing next to Mabel, I got my first frontal look at Norton. The view from the back had been impressive enough, but the front had a whole lot happening.
“See? See?” Mabel shrieked at Norton. “Even the loony girl is shocked by the sight of you. Now, put a top on or you have to go.”
“I’m a man, Mabel. And I need to feel free. I like the water to touch my body. My skin. It’s a sensory thing. Are you trying to deprive me of my sensories?”
“But you have boobs!” she yelled. She was right. He had boobs. They weren’t the expected man boobs situation of most large men. They were boobs. Beautiful D-cup breasts. I was a B-cup, and my left boob was bigger than my right. But Norton had it all going on. He could have been a boob model, if there was such a thing as boob models and if no one minded the thick patch of black hair on them.
“Body shamer!” he yelled. “Sensory depriver! I gotta be me! I gotta be me!”
“This is a family pool! It’s not the Playboy Mansion!” she countered.
“My body needs total immersion in the water without fabric getting in the way. Fascist!”
“Pervert!”
“Commie!”
“Degenerate!”
“Brown shirt!”
“Weirdo!”
“Uptight middle manager!”
It was a boob standoff. It was like a protest at a nude beach but with a twist. What would Bob Woodward do in these circumstances? Would he continue the interview? I was pretty sure he would.
“Did you enlarge the pool, or was it just replastered?” I asked Mabel, averting my eyes from Norton’s cleavage, which was no easy task. She didn’t answer, distracted by movement near the door to the rec center.
I looked over, too. The sheriff had arrived with a deputy. He was a very tall man and big, but not like Norton. Like John Wayne. He was wearing jeans, a blue button-down, boots, a cowboy hat, and a big, gold sheriff’s star on his chest. His eyes flicked to me and then to Mabel, who was waving him over. The deputy with him was a young, slim woman weighted down by her uniform and a heavily laden utility belt. But I didn’t look much at the deputy. My eyes were fixed solely on the sheriff.
Here’s the thing. I never wanted another man in my life. Never. I had had a man, a husband, and he turned out to be a killer. He also married me in order to get an inheritance and put me away in a funny farm. So, obviously my radar wasn’t good about men. If I liked a man, it probably meant that he was a lying, no account murderer. Or worse.
Yes, maybe I had trust issues. Maybe I had been burned once and should have let it go, and whatever the universe threw my way, I should have welcomed with open arms. But my husband was a killer! He married me to get an inheritance, and he gaslighted me and sent me off to a funny farm!
