Deadly Currents by Groundwater Beth

Author:Groundwater, Beth [Groundwater, Beth]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Mystery, Murder, Murders - Colorado, Colorado, Mystery & Detective, regional mystery, soft-boiled, amateur sleuth, General, amateur sleuth novel, mystery novels, Mystery Fiction, Women Sleuths, White-Water Canoeing, Fiction, murder mystery, regional fiction
ISBN: 9780738721620
Publisher: Thorndike Press
Published: 2011-03-08T07:00:00+00:00

So we beat on, boats against the current,

borne back ceaselessly into the past.

—The Great Gatsby, Francis Scott Fitzgerald

Mandy stayed to ensure that the man and his son were loaded into an ambulance. When he called his wife, Mandy got on the cell phone to explain the urgency of his case. She didn’t hand the phone back until she was sure his wife would take over in nagging her husband to submit to treatment.

The first-aid attendant promised he would watch the dog, which Mandy had tethered to a nearby tree.

Once convinced she had done all she could, Mandy set off through the crowd to find Lenny Preble. She picked up a couple of the flyers along the way. Below a muddy smudge, the title of one read, “Save the Arkansas!” A cartoon below it showed a devil dumping a front loader full of uprooted trees into the river. Overkill, but it got the point across.

While searching a block lined with vendors of outdoor sports equipment, adventure magazines, freeze-dried hiking foods, and high-tech sun protection products, she spotted Lenny and his gang wolfing down granola samples at a natural foods booth. In addition to the forest green T-shirts, they all wore matching baseball caps emblazoned with Lenny’s nonprofit logo. She walked over to them. “Hi, Lenny.”

“I see you have some of our flyers,” he mumbled, then swallowed his mouthful. “How do you like the devil cartoon? I drew that one myself.”

Mandy thought she recognized some familiar features in the devil’s face. “Who’d you base the devil on?”

Lenny grinned and sidled up to her. “Can you keep a secret, since I don’t want to disparage the dead? The flyers were printed a couple of weeks ago. I modeled the devil after Tom King. Though Nate Fowler’s not much better. You think the flyers get the message across?”

“Yes, I do. Unfortunately, a lot of them, like these, are winding up on the ground.”

“Stupid tourists.” Lenny waved his hand at a nearby trash receptacle. “Can’t they see the trash cans all over the park? If they don’t want to read about how developers are ruining the river, the least they can do is properly dispose of the flyer.”

Mandy nodded. “No disagreement here. I know how much you care about the river, Lenny, with your litter patrols. I was wondering if your group would be willing to do one along the festival grounds.” She held out the muddy flyers she had picked up. “Since some of the litter, unfortunately, is indirectly coming from you.”

A scowl crossed Lenny’s face. He pulled out his car keys and handed them to one of his cohorts. “Go get some of the heavy-duty trash bags out of my car.”

He made a point of deliberately walking over to the trash can next to the granola stand and throwing his bowl in there. He glared at all the tourists around him and cleared his throat loudly at two teenage girls who had gotten up from a table and left their bowls.

They sheepishly returned and threw the bowls in the can.

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