Murder Unfolds: Chapter 1

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MURDER UNFOLDS

By

Sharon Short

“We’re gonna die,” Cherry Feinster said, although her words didn’t come out that smoothly. Her teeth were chattering, which was no surprise since we were on a small, leaking houseboat in Lake Erie . At about two-thirty a.m. On New Year’s Day.

“You want your last words to be a statement of the obvious?” Sally Toadfern said, also stuttering. If we’d known we were going to be kidnapped and then forced aboard a boat on a stormy winter night, I’m sure we’d have all bundled up in extra scarves and gloves.

Cherry and Sally had every reason to think we were doomed to young deaths, either due to hypothermia if we managed to stay on the boat, or from drowning when the ice storm pitched our boat over and then tossed us into the freezing—and in some parts frozen—Lake Erie.

And it wasn’t as if anyone would come along and find us, even after the ice storm blew over. Fishing charters and ferries stop running on Lake Erie in late November, and they don’t start up again until March.

By then, we’d be walleye bait at the bottom of the lake.

Except, I wasn’t about to let that happen. I’m Josie Toadfern, owner of Toadfern’s Laundromat and the best stain-removal expert in Paradise , Ohio . Or in Mason County . Maybe even in all of…

We hit something hard. Ice chunk? Pier? Land? In the dark, it was impossible to tell.

Sally, my cousin and one of my two best friends—the other being Cherry, who was now crying and hiccupping—started humming the “My Heart Will Go On” theme song from the movie, “Titanic.”

“Stop that,” I chattered. Sally and Cherry were tied to each other, back to back, ankles bound. They’d been kidnapped first.

I’d been kidnapped second.

I was bound at my ankles and wrists, my wrists in front of me, which gave me a little hope, because if I could get to something sharp, I’d have an easier time cutting through the rope tying my wrists.

I also felt a bit of hope because I wasn’t bound to anything, although Sally and Cherry were tied to the anchored legs of the dinette table. I’d been brought on board last, and there hadn’t been anything to quickly bind me to. So our captor had just whacked me in the head, knocking me out for the second time that night.

When I’d finally come to, I’d tried chewing on the rope around my wrists. Two gnaws told me that was going to be impossible. So I started to butt scoot toward the tackle box I knew was just outside the cabin. Butt-scooting was a painfully slow inch-by-inch process, given the cold, the listing of the boat, and the fact I was bound.

Still, my plan was get to the box, pray that it wasn’t locked, that I could open it, and then find something sharp like a fishing knife that I could use to cut my bindings, and then free Cherry and Sally.

I hadn’t thought beyond that, but I was lucky to have come up with any plan at all, given our situation: the leaking boat, the icy water, and Sally’s persistent humming/chattering of the Titanic theme song.

At least our captors had left our mouths uncovered, since our screams wouldn’t get the attention of anything other than a few frigid walleye, trout and salmon, so we could talk. Of course, I’d hoped our talk would be about getting out of our predicament.

But Sally was intent trying to use humor to lighten our last minutes on earth. Well, on lake.

“Sorry,” she said. “Since you don’t like Celine Dion, how about the old Gordon Lightfoot tune about the Edmund Fit-fit-fitzgerald—“

“Th-that freighter went down on L-lake Superior ,” I said, surprising myself with the recollection.

“Then how about the th-theme from G-G-Gilligan’s Island ,” Cherry stuttered. “At least they ended up on w-w-arm island.”

We’d been left without any light, and since it was the middle of the night and there was an ice storm, we didn’t even have a glow of moonlight.

Thud. This time, I went skidding across the floor. I used the momentum to butt scoot even faster, and finally hit the edge of the cabin door with my leg. Eager now, I scooted my way out. As soon as I was outside the cabin, icy rain lashed my face.

I slowed, hoping to find the tackle box with my legs or arms, before going over the edge of the boat.

Finally, I bumped into the box. I struggled, but soon used my bound hands to lever the lid open.

With my teeth, I pulled the glove off my right hand. I knew I’d risk cutting myself, feeling around for a knife that way, but I also knew it would be harder to find with a gloved hand.

Carefully, I pushed my hands into the top of the box, feeling around and drawing back when at last something sharp stabbed into the side of my hand.

But the pain was wonderful because it meant I’d found the knife! I yelped with joy. I turned my hands so that the rope on the top of my right wrist was against the sharp edge. It was more awkward than trying to cut the rope straight on, but I didn’t want to risk a sudden lurch sending the sharp edge between the insides of my wrists.

The rope suddenly gave way. Freedom! But then, the boat lurched again, and I didn’t pull back in time. The knife jabbed into the top of my right wrist. I pulled away, gasping in pain.

“Josie! What’s happening?” Cherry cried, from inside the cabin.

“I… I think I’m bleeding…” I called back.

I felt a warmness seeping from the top of my wrist, and then I became light headed. What to do? I needed to stop the bleeding. I needed to free Cherry and Sally. We needed to see if we could find flashlights or a radio on the boat. We needed to see what we were bumping into. We needed to get off this boat…

Suddenly, I felt like I didn’t want to do any of it at all, like I just wanted to collapse and let the dark speckles that were now dancing before my eyes multiply and grow and overtake me.

“What is wrong with you? Just a few seconds ago, you were thinking about how you have so much to live for!”

That was the voice of Mrs. Oglevee, my old junior high history teacher, who was not on the boat, seeing as how she’d been dead for ten years. But the image of Mrs. Oglevee started showing up in my dreams earlier in the year, when I’d happened to get involved with solving a few murder mysteries, in part thanks to my stain-removal expertise, and in part thanks to my natural nosiness, but always purely by accident—really! I’d be snoozing away, in the peaceful warm fuzzy darkness of sleep—much like the sensation I wanted to give into now—and there she’d be, nattering on about how I SHOULD be involved with solving a murder (whenever I didn’t want to) or how I SHOULDN’T be involved with solving a murder (whenever I did want to).

Usually she’d show up Cheshire-cat like, first her face popping into my subconscious sleep life, like a face from backstage poking through the curtains, and then the rest of her would appear, whether I liked it or not—sometimes in an outlandish get up that she’d never have worn in real life, and sometimes in her regular school marm clothes. Sometimes, she’d make things appear that related somehow to the crime that I was trying to solve.

But this time, it was just her voice.

“Now listen here, young lady! You will not crap out on me now. Get a cloth—there’s a pile of rags back in the cabin—and stop that bleeding!”

“You know,” I said… although I’m not sure if I said it aloud, or just in my head, or a little of both, mumbling, “you would have sent me to the principal in a heartbeat for using the word crap…”

“That was then! This is now! Get those rags!”

“What if I don’t want to?”

“You’re going to just give up? Die out here? Abandon Guy’s fate to the decision-making of others?”

That stung. Of course I didn’t want to abandon Guy that way. Guy is my older cousin. He has autism, and lives in a wonderful group home, Stillwater Farms, north of Paradise , Ohio . His parents reared me from the time I was nine. They both passed away by the time I was nineteen and left me two things: their laundromat business and Guy’s guardianship. In the past eleven years, I’d taken both seriously, cherishing them as the foundation of my life.

But then, there probably wasn’t any way I was really going to save us from drowning in frigid Lake Erie , and meanwhile, this warm fuzziness was drawing me away from the chilling, miserable cold and my likely tortuous fate, and it was so, so tempting…

“Josie! Young lady, you pay attention, now! You can’t give up on Sally and Cherry, either! They need you to help them,” Mrs. Oglevee snapped.

It was true. Neither of them deserved to die this way, either. Sally was the single mother of triplets and worked full time as the owner of the Bar-None and part-time as a carpenter. Cherry had finally found the love of her life.

“It’s your fault, you know,” I said to Mrs. Oglevee, although the words came out fuzzy and as if they were really one word, like iz-yer-all-ya-no. “Investigating your murder got us into this mess…”

“That’s right, and if you don’t get out of this mess, the world will never know the truth!”

That was Mrs. Oglevee; all sympathy and sensitivity. Hah. Once she was subbing in my home-ec class, and I sewed right through my thumb while trying to make the class project—an apron I would never have worn anyway—and the needle snapped off. Her reaction was, “do you know, young lady, how much it costs the school system to replace sewing machine needles?”

She wasn’t any kinder now, even though my injury and predicament were far more serious than a sewing machine needle stuck in my thumb. Why HAD I bothered to investigate her murder… when all of us in Paradise had believed for the past ten years that she’d died of ill-timed heart failure, right before she was scheduled to leave on a Mediterranean cruise?

Truth be told, because I thought if I laid her story to rest, maybe… just maybe… she’d stopped interrupting my sleep cycles.

Then again, if I gave into the dancing dark warm speckles…

“Young lady, don’t you dare!” Mrs. Oglevee screamed, and then she slapped me.

A cold, sudden, watery slap… that was really lake water sloshing over me.

The water-slap got rid of the darkness in my head—it was still dark, of course, all around us—and the sound of Cherry and Sally screaming my name from inside the cabin finished bringing me around.

I was still clutching the knife in my right hand. Carefully, carefully—despite the cold, the water, the panic—I cut my ankles free from one another. Then I crawled back into the cabin and clattered into something else…

The battery powered camper’s lamp! I fumbled around until I was able to turn it on, and a greenish glow filled the cabin. I saw the box of rags, shoved under the captain’s chair. Had Mrs. Oglevee really just told me about those rags… or had I noticed them earlier and filed them away in my subconscious?

At that moment, it didn’t matter.

I grabbed a rag.

Right. First to staunch the bleeding on my wrist. Then I’d free Cherry and Sally. Somehow we’d make radio contact with someone, before we were launched overboard or sank…

And to think this whole mess began—more or less—with a simple coffee stain…