Murder in a Very Small Town by Greg Jolley

Author:Greg Jolley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: murder, suspesnse, thriller, quirky, female main character, mystery, michigan
Publisher: BHC Press
Published: 2017-07-26T16:00:00+00:00

There was no first light of dawn.

Heavy snow was falling, and the very small town of Dent was shrouded. The storm had brought a whiteout.

Snow blanketed rooftops and cars. Drifts formed along Main Street and out on the lake; the ice buried by thick mounds of new snow, shaped by chaotic swirling winds.

Inside the C.O., there was light and warmth, both cranked high. The basement generators were in high gear, and the furnace was blowing hard all along the mainframe under the rows of fluorescent lights.

Wiki sat in one of the office chairs at the desk. She had pulled off her long black coat and the borrowed snow pants and had her feet up on a case of wire spools. Crappy music was playing from somewhere deeper in the building. She had just returned from what Jame called the vault, where she had sat on the steps watching him do his splicing thing. He sat squeezed inside the cramped, low space, tracing and soldering connections within a spaghetti maze of one of the sawed-through cables. Earlier, she had stood beside him as he went through a dozen binders identifying what he called NPA’s and their assigned cable pairs.

The music was annoying and the office smelled like burnt coffee. She looked at the running coffee maker with black caramelized goo inside. The office was business-like and technical looking to her. No personal touches or any colors save lots of gray, wood, and metal. The bright ceiling lights added to the feel of tired business functionality. Under the surface of bad music, there was a current of clicking mechanical sounds coming through the door from what Jame referred to as the switches.

She had used the gray-painted bathroom at the back of the office. She had opened the very old refrigerator and looked inside. She didn’t touch any of the suspect Tupperware containers or paper bags.

She decided to take a nap and lay down on the industrial gray flooring and closed her eyes. Her head had just touched the floor when she heard Jame approaching. His socked feet were not making any sound, but he was talking to himself, mostly numbers and letters.

She turned her head, and watched him enter the office with an open binder in his hands.

“Thirty-seven is mostly spliced. As far as I can go,” he said.

Wiki didn’t speak or nod. She had little idea what he was talking about, even though he had shown her and explained.

“How are you doing?” he asked, putting the binder in the shelf and taking out another.

She watched him leaf through the pages, tab by tab. He found the page he wanted and looked to her.

“Coffee?” he asked.

“Please.”

“We have frappes, espresso with soy cream, mint Thai tea, or, if you’d prefer, sludge you can’t dent with a hammer.”

“Sludge, please,” she grinned.

They watched one another, sharing a half smile, a respite in the tedium.

Jame carried the binder to the coffee maker and turned it off.

“Cable thirty-seven is town, right?” she asked, half-remembering.

Jame shook his head. “Thirty-seven is the lake; well, most of it.

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