Baffled in Boston by Gary Provost

Author:Gary Provost [Provost, Gary]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: murder mystery
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2016-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 11

For a brief moment my adrenaline flowed like champagne. The dream was not dead after all. I could still become a nationally syndicated advice columnist, TV personality, rich person. I would be able to pay my bills and have safe sex with hundreds of women who didn’t have husbands and kids. And of course catch Molly’s murderer, too, Scotty, I rudely reminded myself, don’t let that little thing slip your mind.

Before I left the post office, I read the rest of the letter and learned that there were 103 other semifinalists. So perhaps it was a wee bit early to go shopping for a mansion on Martha’s Vineyard.

The letter, which was signed by Lawrence Dracut, said, “Enclosed are three letters that are typical of the kind Molly Collins has answered in recent years. We simply ask that you answer them. There are no further instructions, and no questions about the letters will be answered.”

Oh, great, I thought. I had finished congratulating myself on being picked from the mire of 18,000 applicants, and now reality was showing its smug face again.

Sure, I had beaten out 18,000 dental assistants and data entry clerks, but now I was in the race with 103 qualified people. A hundred and three to one was practically hopeless. Even Hocus Pocus had gone off at 18-1. My chance of being the new “Dear Molly” was as thin as it had ever been, certainly not worth the time it would take to answer the sample letters and get rejected.

To make things more difficult the letters had to be returned to the Boston Patriot by the twenty-fourth of February, sent by registered mail, and postmarked no later than the twenty-third. It was already three o’clock in the afternoon on the twenty-third. Obviously the Patriot wanted someone who could write under the pressure of a deadline.

As I drove the few blocks back to the cottage, I resolved that I would not answer the letters. Earlier, with Joan, I had accepted the fact that I was out of the running, and I liked it that way. Maybe I was a failure, but at least I knew where I stood. I didn’t want to get my hopes up again. And besides, if somebody was willing to kill for the job, was that really the kind of social set I wanted to get in with? There had to be safer ways of investigating Molly’s murder than throwing myself blindly into the ring with the killer. As I pulled onto the gravel driveway in front of the cottage, I thought, even if I could answer the letters in time, I sure couldn’t answer them cleverly enough to compete with a hundred and three other people who had also been plucked out of the mire. The fact that I was selected as a semifinalist would always be one of life’s small victories, I thought, but nothing more.

Mungus was in his studio hunched over his drawing board. He was drawing a cartoon of two guys walking down a busy city street, and all the stores around them were named “ubiquitous.

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