Wrong Question Read online

  Wrong Question

  Bree-Anne Carver Suspense Blog Book 1

  Edita A. Petrick

  Published by Edita A. Petrick, 2016.

  This is a work of fiction. Similarities to real people, places, or events are entirely coincidental.

  WRONG QUESTION

  First edition. May 17, 2016.

  Copyright © 2016 Edita A. Petrick.

  ISBN: 978-1386750833

  Written by Edita A. Petrick.

  WRONG QUESTION

  Bree-Ann Carver Suspense Blog – Volume 1

  EDITA A. PETRICK

  Wrong Question

  Copyright © 2016 by Edita A. Petrick

  www.editaapetrick.com

  twitter.com/EditaBoni

  www.facebook.com/edita.petrick

  COPYRIGHT NOTICE—ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  The content of this book is protected under Federal and International Copyright Laws and Treaties. Any unauthorized reprint or use of this material is prohibited. No part of this book may be electronically or mechanically reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or retention in any information storage and retrieval system without express written permission from Edita A. Petrick

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, locations, events and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual events or actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Book Cover Art by Elaina Lee of For The Muse Design

  www.forthemusedesign.com

  Book Formatting by Maureen Cutajar

  www.gopublished.com

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  CHAPTER ONE

  Barns usually don’t have windows. The one where I sat, did. My mind insisted that it was just a hole in the wall, cut out without skill into the rough-hewn planks but my eyes knew differently. Then again, my eyes never made it past the looming shadow of the microwave tower that sat just right to obscure any view the window might have offered those condemned to work in the rustic office environment.

  It was four o’clock on a spring afternoon. I sat on my stool-stump, listening spellbound to the percolator abuse the coffee. The last ten minutes I’d been fighting the image of a Starbuck’s coffee cup, growing legs and running away from the relic of Cold War or cold coffee; today the two were synonymous. I’d written my first blog, posted it and clenched my hands in my lap. I didn’t want to let them settle on the laptop keyboard again. Not tonight, not any night…not in this century or the next. I waited and waited. The old coffee maker finished perking and I still sat, immobile in front of my laptop. I was waiting for my first blog subscriber.

  The hairy gnome who bossed me back in New York expected me to have a million before my contract ran out. I expected to be dead long before then. If not physically, then spiritually for sure.

  The solitary ping signalling my first subscriber sounded shy. I blew the stale air from my lungs and palmed the mouse. I scrolled as if the cursor was an invader rappelling down a cliff. I had to catch my first subscriber, print-screen immortalize the event in case he or she reconsidered and un-subscribed.

  The email was a bit odd. [email protected] Well, at least it wasn’t an obscenity poorly disguised with creative spelling. My first subscriber also left a comment.

  “There’s a murderer born in every small town,” ran the comment.

  I wasn’t sure whether the comment was meant to validate my choice of setting for my first fictional murder, since my blog was cleverly named “C-Murder of the Week,” or whether it was criticism.

  “Thank you for subscribing to my blog,” I typed quickly.

  I barely blinked when the answer came. “You made it too easy. Murder may often be transparent but it is never that easy.”

  This was a blog with comments section, not a chatroom but I had to defend my choice.

  “Agatha Christie would disagree with you. Murder is easy,” I typed back.

  “Read Dunne or Edgar Allan Poe then murder someone with finesse.”

  Finesse? What did I get myself into? “Murder is messy,” I wrote back.

  “Only if you get caught.”

  “My blog is meant to entertain as much as challenge my subscribers. I present a fictional case of murder, complete with a solution,” I typed.

  “It’s precisely why you will fail,” came back.

  Fail? Fail in what, for heaven’s sake? I was an intern with the New York Times, banished to its satellite office in Idaho. My job was to write a blog post once a week. My boss left the blog subject up to me—as long as it brought in subscribers, all one million of them. Fortunately, he didn’t stipulate that they all had to come from Idaho or I’d be in trouble. The state population hovered just under two mill and half were probably children. My blog was restricted to 18 and over. My first subscriber was a nutcase. Is that what I was going to draw with my blog—weirdos and mentally unstable personalities that trolled the Web looking for dark challenges—and idiots like me who’d get caught in their trap with a single ping?

  “Thank you for subscribing,” I wrote back. “See murder—read all about it. Stay tuned for the next instalment of C-Murder of the Week.” I quickly logged-out so my fan would not harass me—and criticize me.

  “Hey, Bree, wanna join the team for some well-deserved beer-in-a-bottle and nuts in a glass?” The voice I knew would come and dreaded, just issued an invitation that I would have to refuse—for the second time in just as many days.

  I closed down my laptop and powered down my desktop. I was leaving but not with my co-workers. I was going to sit in my twelve-year old Sentra for ten minutes, sucking air, and then I’d roll down the gentle hill until I hit the paved road. I’d drive around aimlessly for half an hour and then a shred of reason would return. I’d pick up a grilled cheese and pop in Frankie’s Roadside Diner and head home—to the trailer park—my home sweet home. Two weeks ago, I’d have packed up my laptop, stuck it into the foam-padded shoulder bag and declared that I was ready to take any challenge my colleagues threw at me; except two weeks ago they’d still have been my classmates. Two weeks ago, the beer would have come in a classic campus-logo stein, the bar would have been a nut-free zone and I’d have sat on a bar stool that cost more than the entire annual budget of Kinematic Town, Idaho. Two weeks ago I was still mid-Manhattan, attending Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, a scholarship student and a finalist for the prestigious New York Times P.P. Clangmorgan Fellowship. The two-year Times internship came with an extremely competitive compensation package but more importantly, it was what every journalist hankered after post-graduation—big ‘J’—as in a job as opposed to unpaid internship. I had the big ‘J’ but I was also in a place that barely had GPS coordinates; it was that far off the map.

  “Maybe tomorrow, Jacob. I’m tired. I managed to post my first blog—minutes from the deadline and I already have one subscriber,” I said as neutrally as possible so as not to insult him.

  “You know you’re required to write only one blog-post a week, right?”

  “One clever blog post—C-Murder of the Week. Yes, Jake, I clued into that when Ganz begged me to take this job, but who knows when the WiFi goes down aga
in—I’d rather stay here all night and keep churning out my fictional murder stories,” I said not bothering to take the edge off my sarcasm. We had WiFi, most of the time; I suspect that was the primary reason why the Big Apple parent decided to relocate two local barns next to the solitary microwave tower for its rural satellite office. I just found it hard to do my job when everything around me reminded me of lies and betrayal. I already had stellar credentials when I was accepted to the graduate program at Columbia—on scholarship. It wasn’t enough to win the P.P. Clangmorgan Fellowship. I could have lived with that—if I’d been told the truth.

  “Come on, Bree. You need to sleep. You need to re-charge your reservoir.” Jacob was being particularly annoying today.

  “I don’t sleep, Jake. Two weeks ago I choked on a lie and I’m afraid I haven’t managed to come back to life.”

  “So they screwed you, big deal. It’s the New York Times. They do it to every intern.”

  “Not every intern. Just me.”

  “Every intern, Bree, just that they do it differently…every time they do it. It’s called recycling the old and new alike. I heard Ganz say something like that just as I was walking out the door.”

  I looked up. “Did he shake your hand, Jake? Did he pump it as he kept smiling and nodding like a bobble-head, all the while spouting garbage that his copywriters churn out?”

  “He congratulated me on coming third as if that was the greatest honor in newsland-Manhattan.”

  “Third? Interesting. He only congratulated me on placing since it was such an honor to be acknowledged that you were a P.P. Clangmorgan Internship finalist.”

  “There’s five of us here and we were all finalists for the fellowship—and none of us knew who the winner was until she actually started her internship. What does that tell you?”

  “That they shouldn’t have bothered advertising on campuses for candidates.”

  “It’s a requirement of the Fellowship, Bree.”

  “It’s not a fellowship. It’s a joke. They had a candidate, ready to go even before their ads hit the campuses.”

  “Of course they did, but that doesn’t mean it’s not a great honor to be one of the ten finalists for the much-coveted paid internship position at the New York Times. It’s not the ‘biggie’ we all hoped for but it’s a job and at least on paper, we’re interns with the Times,” Jacob said, walking over to my desk that was just a pine plank across two saw-horses, as far as I was concerned.

  “I heard their ‘Bestie’ was treated to lunch for a week when she started—at Marea, natch,” I said rubbing my hands because suddenly it was cold in the barn that the rest of my deceived-intern-colleagues euphemistically called ‘office.”

  “Do you like Italian? I thought you said you’d only eat pasta if they moved the doomsday clock to one minute to midnight.” He had the gall to remind me of all things I wanted to forget. I liked the sound of Marea—or more precisely me talking about how I went for a business lunch at Marea while the rest of my colleagues listened, spellbound. It wasn’t about the food. It was about being valued highly enough to be taken to lunch at Marea.

  “Did you know, Jake, you’d be heading out for Idaho the moment they shocked you with the delightful news that you were one of the candidates; that you placed third?” I let my fingers land on the keyboard, not caring one way or the other that the screen erupted with a string of letters.

  “We were all winning candidates, Bree, not chosen. Only one would be chosen—the finalist. You didn’t listen well. Of course I knew. Times has a truckload of subsidiaries. This is where you wait in the wings, for your big chance.”

  “Wings? Really, Jake, you’re delusional.”

  “And you’re still bitter…I’d have thought you’d have adjusted.”

  “Adjusted—to what? Grassy knolls out there that are mostly green, coniferous forests that are sometimes green or the rocky ground that is mostly gray with just a nice tinge of pale white lichen, or the solitary microwave tower that stands out there, with its Eye of Sauron trained at me…?”

  Jacob pushed up his brows. “Did you bring your collection of Lord of the Rings with you?”

  I made a throaty noise that could pass for ‘yes.’ “I’ll loan it to you Jake, if only you leave me alone and stop inviting me to go sit at a bar that’s made of two rough-hewn pine planks and sit on a stool that wobbles, while listening to the floor that creaks every time the owner’s three mutts pitter-patter behind my back.”

  “They’re actually pure-breads, White Fang, Milo and Body, German Shepherds, and they don’t pitter-patter, they thunder. They’re not small dogs, you know. On a good night, I’ll go through a bag of milk-bones to keep them happy and crunching under the table.”

  “I’m a cat person, Jake. So go join the rest of the prisoners who are out on parole, while I do my job…or whatever.” I loved animals but I leaned toward small fluffy critters that purred rather than hundred-pounders that barked…or pulled sleds.

  “Who are you killing next week?” Jake changed the subject as it happened every time he knew he’d lost and didn’t want to give up.

  I wiggled my fingers above the keyboard. “After posting my first blog, I’m running out of inspiration, Jake.” It was a confession that I hadn’t even made to myself yet. Why did I confess something so personal and so painful to Jake the global-journalist-in-waiting—in Idaho!

  “Well, lock up when you leave, and don’t forget to set the alarm.” He gave up so suddenly that my eyes were still growing large from surprise when the door closed after him. My three other colleagues were already outside. I heard Noah revving Jake’s pick-up. Four of them would drive to some dive off the highway and come back at an indecent hour of ten or eleven o’clock.

  “One million subscribers, here I come,” I whispered.

  I knew there would be five of us in the ‘satellite’ office because HR wouldn’t let me sign my contract and run. They had protocol and it called for acquainting me with my work conditions.

  “Our IT department is really back-logged but I put in a request already. It might take a few weeks though before the VCC is set up,” the girl said. She was my age, maybe even younger. She proudly informed me that she was an assistant, shared by three HR managers, as if that would establish her in my eyes as super-efficient.

  “What’s VCC?” I asked. It sounded like something that should hang on a door of a rustic latrine.

  “Virtual Conference Court. It’s set up especially for interns, for mentoring.”

  “Mentoring usually means human presence, as in mentor,” I pointed out, shaking my head because the shots kept coming; as if I was not dead enough.

  “You’ll be in the satellite office, in Idaho. It’s for interns only. There will be five of you…well, once you get there, there will be five. The others are already there.”

  “You do know that intern is really an apprentice and without a master how pray tell is an apprentice to learn?” I challenge her with simple logic.

  “That’s what the VCC is for. Your profile was already set up, your email likewise so I’ll send you the intern package electronically as soon as you log-in to your account for the first time.”

  “You don’t say,” I mumbled.

  She had canine hearing. “You should adjust your attitude, you know. Snarkiness is like not cool anymore.”

  “Neither is deception,” I said, making it come out as uncaring as I felt.

  “It was a fair competition….” She started. I cut her off.

  “Oh, please, don’t be such a kiss-ass.” And I left.

  I had posted my first blog. By now I’ve logged-in a dozen times, but I had yet to see the promised intern package. I asked my colleagues about the VCC.

  “Oh, that shit about mentoring,” Melina waved a hand. “There’s no VCC. It’s just a concept that’s pitched to the college guidance counselors.”

  “Then how are we supposed to learn up here, all alone, without supervision?” I asked.

  “Sel
f-directed study,” Melina said, smirking.

  “That was in college. What are we doing here guys? Why are we half away across the country from our corporate parent?”

  “Tax breaks and incentives,” Noah said. “The same reason why there’s a cluster of odd-looking new dwellings half a mile from here. Kinematic Town is an experimental settlement that’s also a tax haven. So are we.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  I came at Idaho through Wyoming on I-80, then dipped down to Utah, to where the interstate connected to I-84, just north of Salt Lake City and then swung up on I-84 all the way to Kinematic. The town was situated a little off the beaten path but still within an easy reach of the interstate that swung like a pendulum across southern Idaho. I crossed the Snake River three times and considered turning around twice as many times. Only the visions of my credit score plummeting if I defaulted on my student loans, kept my foot on the gas pedal.

  Towns and settlements grew at places of particular economic significance. Kinematic was no different. It was assembled, rather than built, in response to the manufacturing sprawl. BallymoreTech’s three buildings took up a few acres. One of them even had a helipad on the roof, for the executives, coming to see the demonstration of the latest in computer components. B’Tech owned half of Kinematic. The other half was jointly owned by the rest of the small businesses. The town population was always cited as an estimate only. The actual number on any day depended on promotions, job transfers, rotational opportunities and overall entrepreneurial spirit. The day I arrived and met the mayor in a town hall with paper walls and cardboard roof, Kinematic boasted a four-thousand strong population. That’s what Her Honor, Mayor Donna Lischek told me. She was a pleasant looking woman in her fifties, with a fierce hair-do. The last time I’d seen spiked hair I was in high school and my best friend turned “goth.” She asked me how my trip went then, not waiting for my answer, proceeded to sell her experimental town’s amenities. There was a bakery and coffee shop with beauty salon, rolled into one. There was a medical clinic run by husband-wife team MDs, a post office inside a real estate office, vet’s office and animal clinic to look after the man’s best friends—though they were equipped to deal with exotics as well.