Malicious

I HAD RACED through my paper route this morning, chucking papers onto the frozen front yards of Marlboro, New York, in January. Normally, I’d stop and chat with the customers who happened to be up around dawn, but today I just waved. It’s a shame, because that’s my favorite part of the job.

Now I was in my unofficial office for my unofficial second job. For the past few years I had made my office in a little diner off Route 9 named Tina’s Plentiful. Tina didn’t mind, because I occasionally brought in a little extra traffic. I have to admit that lately there hadn’t been much extra traffic. But right now, Edith Ledbetter sat across from me with a pleasant look on her aging face. No one under seventy is ever named Edith. She’d approached me about three months ago to see if I could locate her estranged daughter. They hadn’t spoken in twenty-six years, since the daughter turned twenty-one and thought that Syracuse University had turned her into the smartest human on earth.

But years have a way of making people lonely and feel their regrets more acutely. Even after I explained that I wasn’t a licensed private investigator, Edith said that she didn’t care and hired me on the spot. Word-of-mouth recommendations in the community had helped me. I was honest and generally let my clients decide how much they wanted to pay.

We’d been waiting together almost forty-five minutes and there was no sign of the daughter. She had told me she would be at the diner at eight o’clock. I didn’t like the looks of this at all.

Edith said, “It’s some kind of miracle that you found Linda after all these years.”

“All I really did was use the internet. It wasn’t that big a deal.”

“And you drove all the way down to Philadelphia.” Edith looked up at the clock on the wall between the two framed posters of the California coastline. “Are you sure she really wanted to see me?”

I hoped Edith wasn’t keeping track of the time.

“Of course she wants to see you.” It was a shade of the truth. The daughter had been hesitant, but when I told her about the sweet eighty-year-old woman who missed her, she had agreed to meet at the diner when she was on a trip to Albany with her husband.

The new waitress, Alicia, flashed me a wide smile from the counter. She was the only one here I had let in on the plan. Her intelligent eyes darted to the front door. She sensed my apprehension. I just shrugged.

Edith said, “Maybe she changed her mind. She’s waited this long. I bet it was too much for her.”

Alicia came by with some coffee for us and chatted with Edith about her homemade sweater and how nice her new glasses looked.

Alicia, God bless her, knew to keep Edith’s mind off the time.

I said, “Edith, there could have been a mix-up. Although the roads are clear, it’s awfully cold and it might’ve changed Linda’s plans. Should we wait at your house where you might be more comfortable?”

“But what if Linda shows up and we’re not here?”

I looked at Alicia, who was still standing right next to our booth, and said, “I bet I could talk Alicia into calling us if Linda comes later.”

Alicia nodded. She had replaced Mabel, a young woman whose death was still a mystery and haunted me. I respected the fact that Alicia had moved back to Marlboro to care for her father while he recovered from a stroke.

Just as I got Edith to her feet and we turned toward the front, I noticed a woman in an expensive leather coat standing silently just inside the door. It took me a moment to realize it was the same woman I’d spoken to in Pennsylvania three weeks earlier. She just stared at us. That’s when my anger melted away. This woman was scared.

As I held Edith by the arm, I felt her tense and knew that she had recognized her daughter even after two and a half decades. Edith took a tentative step forward. The few people in the diner didn’t even realize what was happening, but Alicia did. She wrapped my hand in hers and squeezed it.

I watched in excited silence as Edith moved closer to her daughter. Suddenly Linda burst forward and hugged her mother. They both started to cry. So did Alicia. Damn it, so did I, but I was able to cover it well.

They both plopped down in the booth closest to where they’d been standing, holding each other’s hands across the table.

Then my phone rang and I saw it was my brother, Natty.

I thought about ignoring the call. Now wasn’t the time and Natty wasn’t the person I wanted to talk to. I hate to confess it, but the scene made me really want to call my mom.

But guilt got the better of me and I answered the phone, “Hey, what’s up?”

“I never thought I’d say this, but I need your help. I need your private investigator skills.”

My brother wasn’t much for compliments. I was skeptical and knew my brother could be a jackass. I always had to be on the lookout for pranks.

I said, “What kind of case?”

“A homicide. I’m not kidding, Mitchum, I need your help right now.”

I looked up at Edith and her daughter, who were chatting like family should, and told Natty, “I’m on my way.”

If there was one thing I knew about my brother, it was that he had a knack for making mistakes. And it seemed like this one was deadly.