CHAPTER 1
Penny Blackwell
The last time I held my key to this lock, my worn-out bell-bottoms brushed over a dead body on the pavement as I hopped into my boyfriend’s red convertible, and Rex Smith’s “You Take My Breath Away” poured from the car’s radio. I hadn’t set foot in Willows Creek since.
Until now, here I was, stepping around a fading white chalk line tracing the shape of another dead body. It was 5 AM on a cool and rainy October Wednesday morning, with the moon still high in the sky.
The hair on the back of my neck stood while an owl hooted. I scanned what I could see of the landscape since the motion detector only lit the area in front of the door.
Last evening, Uncle Carl Blackwell, who owns this in-hill garage attached to a mammoth red barn, sent me a surprise direct message ordering me to get my butt back to Willows Creek before sunup.
Willows Creek is a little village amongst cornfields bordered by a lake and a state park. It’s about ten minutes south of Riverbend. Now, except for the university and a classic car museum, Riverbend isn’t all that special, but it’s a three-hour drive from Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, and Indianapolis. What I guess I’m telling you is there are lots of roads that lead to this area and few good excuses not to come.
Uncle hadn’t said much, except for the “butt here” thing. I did get out of him that yesterday morning he’d discovered the body of Melvin Mercer on the cement drive just behind me. The heels of my black boots rested on what would be his head area if Melvin was still lying there.
Melvin had been a suspect in the last murder Sam, Pete, and I had investigated as part of the School’s Out Murder Club. The club only had three members: Me—Penny Blackwell—and Sam and Pete Harrison, the brothers who lived down the road. Uncle Carl’s house and my grandparents’ house sat between our parents’ houses. Uncle didn’t have any children of his own. He wasn’t all that much older than we were, and he never married. So, he was sort of like an older brother to all of us, an older brother with cool gadgets, a car, wit, and knowledge which he used to invent things and sell them to big corporations for lots of money. Uncle Carl also had this uncanny gift for finding things, places, objects, and parts. That’s probably how he tracked me down.
But I can tell you about Uncle later; right now, you want to hear more about Melvin. As far as I could tell from my conversation with Uncle, Melvin had just gotten out of prison Monday. He was released when they finally figured out, after forty-four years, that Melvin was an innocent man.
Well, of course, he was innocent. Pete, Sam, and I had tried to tell the cops that. The Chief of Detectives was a sour, round man who tired of our investigations making him look bad, and he fabricated evidence against Melvin for profit and promotion.
I was surprised it had taken the justice system this long to figure out Melvin Mercer was innocent.
Sucking air into my lungs, I turned the key and pushed the door open, giving it an extra shove with my shoulder. Ouch. Even after all these years, Uncle hadn’t fixed the dang door.
Coughing because of the dust, I took a step inside and reached for the switch. It worked. A dusty bulb illuminated my past.
Our old black filing cabinets still lined the west side, backed by the white cement block wall that was now more stone gray. Three forest green metal desks sat in a u-shape in the center of the room, and a Coca-Cola calendar with a picture of Santa Claus and a baby Rudolph was still pinned to the bulletin board behind my desk in the middle. Next to Santa hung the yellowed and crispy newspaper clipping showing the police handcuffing Pete, Sam, and me. I ran my finger over the paper. We were so young and thought we were so smart and so old.
Where had the years gone? They’d marched on like the water dripping outside. One year after another.
This photo was taken in front of the police station in downtown Riverbend.
We’d crashed the news conference where Mayor Kevin Lindsey, Chief of Police Dan Fitzgerald, and Chief of Detectives William Manning announced the arrest of Melvin Mercer. Pete, Sam, and I yelled that the cops had the wrong guy. We screamed corruption. As you can imagine, our outburst ticked off the chiefs. Out of nowhere, several big police officers picked us up and shoved our bodies into the back of a squad car before dropping our butts in a field just across the state line.
Lucky for us, the Captain of the Princess City Paddle Boat happened to be a friend of Uncle Carl’s, and he offered us free rides back to the dock and called Uncle to pick us up.
Unfortunately, Uncle couldn’t keep the news from our parents, and well, we’ve been grounded for eternity.
But as history would later prove, we were correct. At least it proved poor Melvin hadn’t murdered The Sidwells. The jury and probably a huge payout still hung in the air over whether there’d been a cover-up or just massive incompetence by all those legal officials tasked with finding the truth.
But I and the rest of the School’s Out Murder Club knew that the truth was shaded by green.
And I’m not talking grass. Although, some weed may have been a part of the deal back then.
We knew who the real killer was, at least one of them. We believed there were more. Greg Jones’s daddy and some of his wealthy friends had paid off the right people, and Greg had walked free. His name never came up in the official investigation.
But Greg was dead. He’d died on the football field his senior year of college. He was a shoo-in to play for the Chicago Bears, but he’d taken a freak hit in the last minutes of the 4th quarter, and his neck snapped. Reports said he was dead before he hit the turf.
So, unless Greg’s ghost could strangle a 6-foot-4 prison-hardened Melvin, Greg wasn’t responsible for the chalk line out front.
I pulled out my old green chair, sat my much wider behind in it, giving it a twirl. Outside, a shadow crossed the window. I shivered. Get a hold of yourself, Penny. It’s just the wind. My chair, it still spun but creaked. Was my weight responsible, or the dust and corrosion from the decades? I was going with the decades. Being back here, facing my mistakes, I needed all the self-confidence I could muster. Facing your stupidity ain’t easy. And I had buckets of it to dig through.
Anyway, you know, at least for me, there’s something about drawers that begs me to open them. The pull was too strong. I couldn’t stop even though I knew there were memories inside I didn’t want to revisit.
Rolling my chair over to the calendar, I reached behind it and felt for the loose brick. It still moved. A damp musty smell greeted me. Hopefully, nothing in the hole behind the brick moved. Using my phone’s flashlight, I shined my beam into our secret hiding place. No snakes. That was good. I hate snakes. And just as I had hoped, three keychains lived inside. Mine were on the purple sock keychain lined in gold. It featured a small plastic frame protecting a picture of young me with bright red hair and green eyes standing next to a cutout figure of my dream idol.
Yeah, I was an avid Donny Osmond fan. Deal with it. I was still cool. But now you know why my ex-husband made my life a nightmare. My rough around the edges demeanor, do-it-my-way attitude, and pleasantly plump body weren’t acceptable in his highly brushed, polished, waxed, botoxed, and latexed world. You can’t educate the country out of some people, me being one of them. But my husband had his ways.
Placing my key in the lock, it twisted with ease, and the latch clicked. I opened the bottom drawer.
A purple can of Aqua Net hairspray greeted me. Beside it lay a purple brush and comb, a purple tube of lipstick, and a purple teddy bear Sam had won for me at the fair after I bet him, he couldn’t hit the target. Aside from solving crime, music, and later Nicole, Sam loved baseball. He lived to throw baseballs at everything: fence posts, trees, batters, catchers, other kids. There was never a time a baseball wasn’t near him, most of the time in his hand. So, when I said he couldn’t hit the target, well, those were fighting words.
A package of tampons wrapped in pink rounded out the drawer. I grabbed that package and tossed it across the floor into the wastebasket.
“Take that, suckers. You no longer darken my world.” They landed soundly in the basket’s middle. I hadn’t lost my touch. A rush of damp air swirled around me. Something clicked.
Turning back around, something cold and hard touched my face. I froze while my heartbeat pounded in my ears. Slowly my gaze followed the hard metal where my nose connected with the barrel of a semi-automatic pistol.
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