Hotel California by Don Bruns

Author:Don Bruns [Bruns, Don]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
Published: 2022-03-21T22:51:03+00:00

Try and

Love Again

Amanda Flower

“Ernie, I know that you took the money.” I leaned my back against the bar and watched the thin, sixtysomething man tap the side of the beer glass with his blunt fingertips. It was in the middle of the day, but you wouldn’t know it walking down Catawba Street in the village of Put-in-Bay, located in one corner of South Bass Island just five miles from Ohio’s Lake Erie coast. The village was notorious for drinking and having a good time. Hundreds of thousands of visitors crossed from the mainland on the ferry to get away from it all every year. Fewer than two hundred of us live here year-round.

Not many people outside of the Great Lakes Region or outside of Ohio knew there was such an island in Lake Erie. I’d known all my life since I was born and raised here. I loved the island and didn’t want to leave. That wasn’t the norm. Not many people stay. If you don’t want to work at a bar or a bed-and-breakfast, there isn’t much for you here. However, I found my niche as a private investigator on the island. There was a need for it. A startling number of people crossed the water and lost their common sense. I can’t find that for them, but I look for the people, money, and other belongings they might have misplaced while visiting. I was excellent at finding those, both in person and online. During the summer months, most of my work is face-to-face with people like Ernie, but in the winter when the island’s population shrank, I took my business almost exclusively online and trolled the dark web for digital criminals while sipping hot cocoa. The face-to-face stuff is more my speed; the computer stuff pays the bills.

Ernie squinted and scrunched up his face. “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Jay-Jay.”

“Ernie,” I said. “Come on. If I didn’t know you were guilty already, I would by looking at your face. If I tapped ‘guilty expression’ into my phone right now, your face would come up.”

Ernie tried to force his mouth into a neutral expression, but it came off as pitiful.

“Ahh, come on, Jay-Jay. Give a guy a break. I thought we were in this together.”

“In this together” was a phrase I heard often from year-round islanders. It was like it was us against the tourists—and sometimes worse than the tourists, the “summer people.” The summer people tended to think that the island was theirs because they stayed up here for three months of the year, usually June to August. Not one of them would survive January on the island, no matter what their claim of ownership was.

“I’m happy to give you a break, Ernie. I’m doing that by not calling the police department. Besides, you know they don’t want to have to arrest you again. No one in the department wants to take in a local if they can avoid it. Just hand over the two hundred dollars you took from the tip jar at the Music Box, and I’ll make this go away.

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