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.
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.
Are you following me?
