Jess Lourey - Murder-By-Month 02 by June Bug

Author:June Bug [June Bug]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

The anticipation was killing me, but I wanted to get far away from Jason and Shangri-La before I examined the scroll of leather in the purple fabric. I jogged to my car, locked all the doors, and drove to Ben’s Bait in town. There, under the flickering glow of the parking-lot light, I unwrapped the cloth on the passenger seat and peeled the top layer back with all the anticipation of a lover opening a Valentine’s Day gift. This movement released the scent of mothballs and revealed the tied, cracked leather inside. I unrolled this, too, and found a yellowed document within. The paper was so thick it felt handmade, and the blue-black ink had bled through when the message had been scratched on it decades earlier. The writing on the front was still clear, however, and it read:

Jvgu lbhe onpx gb gur xvffvat gerr jnyx frira fgrcf abegujrfg xarry 76 yrsg 87 evtug 88 yrsg.

My stomach dropped. I had been hoping to find a map with a big red X over a sparkly, Richie Rich drawing of diamonds. This was a message in a foreign code with regular numbers. I slapped my steering wheel in frustration. There was nothing more I could do with this tonight. Tomorrow, I would bring it to Battle Lake’s resident wordsmith to see what he could puzzle out from it.

I woke up one hour past sunrise on Gina’s faux-leather couch with a lump the size of a crab apple dead center on my forehead and a headache of Mardi Gras proportions. I stumbled into her bathroom, showered, and felt slightly worse. I needed coffee, ibuprofen, and a talk with Ron Sims, the county crossword-puzzle champion. He took words pretty seriously, and if he couldn’t unscramble the puzzle I had found in the closet, no one could. One didn’t get to run a newspaper without loving the language.

While I was in the newspaper’s office, I needed access to the Battle Lake Recall’s archives to find out what the paper had to say about the diamond necklace and Mrs. Krupps back when it had all happened. A second visit to Shirly Tolverson might be in order as well. What I saw in the master bedroom the night before confirmed that he had done some judicious editing of his Shangri-La story. I hoped I could accomplish all this before I needed to open the library at ten.

I wrapped myself in a towel and stepped gingerly out of the bathroom, trying to hold my tender head completely still on my neck. Gina was sitting on the couch in the living room. “Hey, G, you have any ibuprofen?” It took me a second to realize that she shouldn’t be home at this time of day; she should be three hours into her slave shift. Another beat later, I realized that she was crying.

“He’s cheating.”

“What?”

“Leif. He’s cheating on me.”

I sat down next to her and stretched my arm as far as it would reach around her plump shoulders. Her husband had always been the noncommittal type, but I had never taken him for a cheater.

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