White Nights by Deb Davies

Author:Deb Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: mystery, murder, michigan, upper peninsula, mystery & crime, amateur detectives, suspense
Publisher: BHC Press
Published: 2021-12-21T16:00:00+00:00

“So Maddy was using an assumed name, Pierce, trying to avoid her husband, your friend Bane.” Arnie and Rob were sitting at a mom-and-pop restaurant in Manistique, drinking coffee.

“I still think Bane’s a stand-up guy.” Rob looked stubborn. “I guess I knew he was married, but it’s not the first thing I wonder about, with men. I never met his wife. I mostly know him as a businessman in this area, and I like his ideas.

“For one, he wants to upgrade the look of small towns along US 2. Not lose their local color, but embellish their curbside appeal, give them more eye appeal to tourists driving through.”

“How’s he trying do that?” Arnie sipped execrable coffee, hot from a warm-up he hadn’t asked for. Rob, he figured, or Rob and Brandy must come here often.

“See that sign out front of this place? ‘Sunrise to Sunset Coffee’?” Rob pointed. “Nice and new. Bane put up the cash for a ‘Redesign Your Sign’ contest. Five-hundred-dollar prize and the sign made free for you. Ten entries; the prize went to a motel five miles west of here, had a neon sign at night, but nothing to catch your eye in the daytime. Now it says, ‘Fishing Boats and Garden Tours.’ He got high school kids to volunteer to teach computer basics; that helps mom and pop types do internet ads. Gives out free flower seeds.”

“Quite the community booster,” Arnie admitted.

“Most important to me, he’s trying to raise money for a new used fire engine. We got volunteers; I’m one. The damn things are expensive, but the one we’ve got is a piece of burned-out crap. Not burned, burned out.” Rob looked down at his plate and pushed doughnut crumbs around. He’d had the cinnamon sugar; Arnie had ordered plain. “He’s put up thirty thousand and is trying to raise the rest.”

“Where’d he get money like that?” Arnie asked.

Rob shrugged. “He’s got a business degree, but he got his start playing poker. His last year at Northern Michigan, he made $350,000 after taxes. I heard he and his wife got married young, and when he was at school, she lived with his parents, took care of his mom.”

“Has he even claimed her body?”

“He will when the investigation is over. Says he’ll hold a celebration of her life.”

“Rob, abusers don’t fit a single profile. But Bane’s wife surely fits the profile of someone who was being abused. She was using an assumed name and kept moving around, exactly what a woman does when she’s hiding from someone.”

Rob shook his head. “I can’t see him hurting her. He’s got a brother, Bailey? Big, not so smart. Wonder where he was when that happened. Bane, though, would make a good mayor or county commissioner someday.”

Arnie shook his head. “Maybe he wanted her back home. Wouldn’t help his reputation to have his wife living hardscrabble. They had words, quarreled. She could have told him she was never coming back.”

Rob sat a minute, cogitating. Arnie was tempted to raise

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