May on this Blog...

Sunday, April 10, 2022

Is the Reverend Dead? by Leanne Dyck (a mystery inspired by remote island life) Ch 15

chapter fourteen: Conner, Mrs. Hazelton's grandson, confesses to accidentally murdering Reverend Paulson.

photo by ldyck

Is the Reverend Dead?

Chapter Fifteen

“Arthur!” Honestly, sometimes that man. He just doesn’t listen. I storm up to the TV and turn it off. Finally, he looks at me. “We have to go to the police station.”

“Okay, say ‘hi’ to Officer Boyd for me.”

“No, Arthur, you’re not hearing me. We have to go. You have to come with us.”

“I’m sure you can handle it.”

“Arthur, our grandson killed the Reverend!”

“What? Who killed….?”

“We don’t have time. I’ll explain in the car.”

Arthur hoists himself out of his easy chair and goes off to search for the car keys.

As quickly as my old lady legs can carry me, I make my way from the living room to the spare room. No voices leak into the hall. I knock; there’s no answer. I push the door open. The room is empty—no Conner, no Paisley. The window is open. They must have—. “Arthur! They’re gone.”

“They couldn’t have gotten far on foot.”

I glance at the alarm clock by the bed. “The ferry. If Conner catches it, he’ll be a fugitive. When they catch him they’ll throw him in jail. His future will be making license plates.”

“Well, we’ll just have to find him before he gets to the ferry.” Arthur jiggles the car keys.

photo by ldyck

Chapter Sixteen

Are you following me?

Sharing my Author Journey...

Last week was a challenge. The power went out at least twice--was it three times. Days

Is the Reverend Dead? Ch 14 (a mystery inspired by remote island life) by Leanne Dyck

chapter thirteen: Conner, Mrs. Hazelton's grandson, seems very upset to discover that Reverend Paulson is dead.

photo by ldyck

Is the Reverend Dead?

Chapter fourteen

“How was I supposed to know that he would die? I just wanted to make sure it worked.” A girl’s voice is coming from the spare room. “It’s not my fault that he’s dead.”

Conner is a good boy. He wouldn’t be alone with a girl in his room. It must be the radio. Yes, it’s the radio or his computer or...something.

“But he’s dead, and it’s because of what you made.” Conner is so starved for company that he’s talking to...it.

“What we made. It’s your fault too.” It’s talking back...or?

I push the door open. A blonde floozy is sitting on my grandson’s bed. Her leg is touching his. Arthur must have let her in.

“Granny, this is Paisley and we’re in—.”

“No, don’t tell her,” the floozy says.

“A lot of trouble.”

It takes him a while to tell me the whole story, but eventually, the truth comes out. “It’s hard to go to high school on the big island. They think we’re freaks just because we live on Plumper. They think we’re stupid just because our island is so small. We had to prove them wrong. We had to come up with something big for the Science Fair. And when Paisley said she had a killer idea, I didn’t think she meant murder.”

“Hey, don’t shove this all on me. I didn’t want to kill anyone. I wanted to show them the risk. I wanted to show them what bad people could do. I wanted to show them that they needed to do something about the problem. And...and...besides you helped make it too.”

“What did you make?” I ask.

“It’s just a device for opening garage doors.” His voice falls to a whisper. “That, unfortunately, shuts off pacemakers. I didn’t think it would work, if I had I wouldn’t have tested it.”

“Or made it,” I say.

“Yeah, that too,” he agrees. “But we did test it at the church. We figured there’d be lots of old people with pacemakers there. And that the signal would be too weak to do any real damage. I mean, it was coming through a thick wall. Nobody would get hurt. They’d just feel a little faint or something like that. We never thought there’d be any danger. But the Reverend d… We didn’t mean to. Please, you have to believe me.”

All I can see is my kind, thoughtful, loving, lovable grandson. It wasn’t his fault. It was… It was… Science is evil. “Where is the...thing?” I ask.

“I threw it away,” Conner tells me.

“No, you didn’t.” Paisley drags her backpack out from under the bed. She pulls out a black metal box about the size of a paperback. Really, the thing looks as dangerous as a TV remote controller.

photo by ldyck

Chapter Fifteen

Are you following me?

Sunday, April 3, 2022

Is the Reverend Dead? Ch 13 (a mystery inspired by remote island life) by Leanne Dyck

chapter twelve: Mrs. Hazelton brings the evidence she has collected to the police station. Officer Boyd tells Mrs. Hazelton that she's under suspicion of murder and orders her not to leave the island.

photo by ldyck

Is the Reverend Dead?

Chapter Thirteen

Hot water and dishwashing soap mix together forming a foam of bubbles in the sink. I add the lunch dishes, beginning with the cutlery--knives, forks, and soup spoons.

My radio show will be on in a few minutes. I flip the switch and catch the tail end of the news: “The trailer is sky blue, with a flap you flip up to sell food. It’s old—from the 1960s or 70s. There’s moss growing on the roof and walls. It hasn’t been used for years. My idea was to do an article on it for my blog. Plumper Island’s entertaining past—that kinda thing.”

Plumper Island? Someone from our island is on the news. That’s a once-in-a-decade event.

“I’m a blogger. I have a blog. Did I tell you that? Pumped on Plumper. You know like gas. Only this is island events and history and—all that stuff. Cool name, eh?”

Did he say that he was a blodder? What’s a blodder?

“So that’s what I was doing—checking things out. I tried the door. It was hard to open. I thought it might be locked. But one good shove and I was in. Oh, it stuck so bad, worse than old socks. But someone had cut a trail through the slim. I followed the footprints to a new, blue trap. It covered something lumpy. I picked up a corner and found a body, a guy—some of his body parts were missing.”

A heart? A finger? An eye? It had to be the Reverend’s body.

“Could you tell what he’d been doing there?” The interviewer asks.

“What he was doing? Who? The body? Not much, he was dead.”

“Were there signs of a struggle?”

Conner comes into the kitchen. He’s too young to hear all that so I turn the radio off.

“What’s a blod?” I ask him. “Pumped on Plumper was on the radio.” It’s a catchy name.

He grabs three cookies. I taught him that when he was little—one cookie for each hand and one for your mouth. “Oh, yeah, I know that blog. A blog is a bunch of articles you can read online.” He suppresses a chuckle, when he says, “And no, not a clothing line. The Internet.”

“I know about the world wide web, Sonny,” I say in an old lady voice that makes him laugh.

“Pumped on Plumper is all about what we’re doing on island and sometimes what we shouldn’t be doing. What was he talking about?”

I wonder if this blogger boy can help me. Maybe he saw Ms. Matthews acting suspiciously. Mind full, I say, “He found the Reverend’s—.”

“I didn’t know that the Reverend was lost.”

“Bod—.” I bite down on the word.

“His body? Is the Reverend dead?”

I’ve scared him. I have to… “No, of course not.” I can’t lie to him. “Except that maybe he is. He collapsed in the church, 40 days ago. It was the first day of Lent. He was sermonizing. He could make sinners weep. He could call out the devil and spit in his eye. He could—.”

“40 days ago?”

“He fell right in front of—.”

“Granny, did the Reverend have a pacemaker?”

“Yes, he had heart surgery a couple of years ago. We were all really worried about h—.”

Conner runs down the hall and slams shut his bedroom door.

He's so upset. And I didn’t even realize that he knew-- had known Reverend Paulson.

photo by ldyck

Chapter Fourteen

Are you following me?