Wrong Question Read online

  “Deer may come right up to your door,” she said, reflecting on something that must have been a difficult memory because her forehead creased. “And folks around here even had a mountain lion and black bear come right up through the back field but you don’t have to worry about that. You just stay inside if you think something’s prowling outside and give us a call; well, Sheriff Burkhart that is. He’ll dispatch a unit to send the nosy critters packing. I think you’d have to worry more about a dog that breaks off a leash than wildlife.”

  She spoke about the manufacturing sector’s cooperative effort. I visualized a great asphalt ribbon between the B’Tech and SaniPure Chemical Company a mile down the road, built for robots who’d zip up and down between the two manufacturing giants on magnetic strips. She took my pursed mouth for awe and spent five minutes telling me about her vision for Kinematic-of-the-future.

  Mayor Lischek had been told that I would be writing a blog. “It’s good for everyone to have big business like the New York Times take interest in our communities out here. I’ll let you settle down first but we have a lot of local talent doing news in these parts—two weekly newspapers and a community channel. I’m sure they’ll be able to give you a lot of interesting material to write your blog.”

  My blog was not going to become a promo billboard for Idaho’s manufacturing sector or tourism. But I kept my mouth shut. There was no point to dash her hopes for promoting her town and its services. She’d find out soon enough, when and if she became my subscriber.

  When the Mayor finally let me go, I drove around the town once, just to be able to convince myself that the colorful boxes were indeed dwellings and not some bizarre regatta. All the houses were made of siding that had to jump through the rainbow. It came in every color bold enough to bite the eye. The Mayor said that B’Tech had leased all the houses and then turned around and re-leased them to their employees. I wondered if the occupants referred to each other as, “Jane from the purple house,” or “The Smiths from the apple green bungalow.”

  An hour later, when I stood in a clearing, looking at a horseshoe convoy of trailers, I wondered if I’d be called “trailer-trash Bree-Ann.” I’d spent eighteen years in a comfortable house with a wide sunlit verandah, then made the transition to a dorm environment. I’d lived in a flat with five roommates and I’d spent many weekends in chalets, hotel rooms and motels. The transition to a trailer that sat on cinder blocks was inevitable.

  The greatest change from New York to my rural environment, came in the morning. In New York, I woke up to vibrant life, full of robust noise, human and mechanical. In Kinematic when I woke up, I automatically went to take out my earplugs—and didn’t find any. The silence was creepy. I sat on the edge of my bunk, waiting for the sound of life to assault my eardrums. It never came. Only the silence lingered all around me. Even my car ran more quietly than it did in New York. Everything ran silently in Kinematic…silently and differently.

  The satellite office was a gloomy structure. I could have lived with its unimaginative boxy appearance. I could have even grown used to its ‘peaceful’ location in a clearing that was a clearing in the true sense of the word. Idaho had lots of trees. Those few hundred that were cut down to produce a fairly flat tract of land so two boxes could be plunked down in the middle, would be hardly missed. I could have learned to pretend that the looming microwave tower was a friendly presence, especially since it meant I’d have a strong cell phone signal. What was hard on my sensibilities was the grimy gray-brown color of the boards—outside and inside. White walls were clean. Blue walls were cool and charming. Red walls would have made me nostalgic for Chinatown but gray-brown…I hardly believed my eyes when I entered the structure for the first time. The second time, I squinted and stumbled around until I found the only unoccupied desk. My colleagues introduced themselves with economy as if sensing that it wasn’t time yet for familiarity.

  Jake was from Illinois, Melina from Ohio. Noah and Emilie were from Michigan and Vermont, respectively. They each had a separate trailer. It was a waste of resource. The corporate in New York could have saved a ton of money since the two were a hand-holding couple. Their sleeping arrangements went hand-in-hand too. Normally I wasn’t indifferent to my surroundings or people in it, but what happened to me in New York crushed my compass of ambition and confidence. I had never before misjudged a situation that badly. The elevator door didn’t just close on me—the elevator never came.

  I looked around without making it obvious. Five utility desks were not arranged in any functional pattern. They were simply put down where the movers found an empty spot. Melina’s desk was about ten feet away, to my left. Her monitor was large enough to hide her presence. If she really wanted to block me out she could slouch down and all but disappear. Jake’s desk faced mine—across a good expanse of space. Was it his choice to pick a desk so far from everyone…especially from me?

  They knew I was coming; the last arrival. Did they think I was making a statement arriving after everyone had settled in? I was the only New Yorker—of sorts. Was Melina hiding behind the monitor because she didn’t want to see the ‘designer’ label on my forehead? That was not the impression I wanted to make on my barn-mates. If I moved my desk three feet back and off to the right I’d be in a much better position to be a part of the campfire gathering. I rose, gripped the edges of the plank and pulled.

  “What are you doing?” Melina’s head came up from behind the monitor. It looked as if someone had pushed a button that raised her stool.

  “Don’t bother,” Jake said loudly.

  I ignored both of them and pulled harder.

  “Yo, intern, they’re bolted to the floor,“ I heard Noah’s voice filled with pure unfiltered contempt.

  I could only gape at him.

  “Cheer up,“ Jake said. “Imagine what other exciting discoveries are waiting for you in Kinematic, Idaho.”

  CHAPTER THREE

  Jake was long gone but I still sat there, staring into space. If I held my breath I might pass out and maybe hit my head on the desk. My colleagues would find my cold crumpled figure in the morning…was ten hours enough for the rigor mortis to set in?

  My purse was somewhere under the desk. I moved my foot until I found it then dragged it toward me. My colleagues had left but checking whether the coast was clear was a habit rooted in self-preservation. There could be a security camera somewhere but other than the regular office equipment, there wasn’t much to secure.

  “All right,” I whispered and bent down to get my purse. It was a shapeless leather satchel, the kind that could hold anything without giving away its shape—or contents. The first bottle I took out was a ‘quil. I put it back. It wasn’t time to sleep yet. I needed a ‘deine and maybe a shot or two of stronger orange syrup. It was my most effective combo that would bring on the much-needed state of grace, where I’d be clear headed and relaxed at the same time. The fear was waiting for me, lurking somewhere out there. It had a habit of pouncing on me when I least expected. I chugged the syrup and tossed in two green gel-caps to help the liquid do its job better. Only then I sat back, letting the purse slide off my lap, and closed my eyes.

  It took me seven days to write my first blog post. I barely made the deadline. It wasn’t that I couldn’t choose from a myriad of imaginative ways to dispatch a victim. It was the setting that had blocked my imagination.

  “Hollywood,” Jake made his contribution. “Everybody wants to read about murders in the land of rich and famous.”

  I saw his point, especially since that morning, on my way over to the barn-office, I passed a truck with a huge load of potatoes spilling out of a sack painted on its side. However, Hollywood murders had to have complex motives. My imagination wasn’t up to such complexity. Not in Kinematic, Idaho.

  “You’re striving for global readership, right?” Melina asked. She told me about her encounter with Ganz-the-troll with little emotion and great economy. He stood there when the elevator doors opened. He welcomed her w
ith a smile and a congratulatory handshake then proceeded to tell her about her good fortune—placing very high in the final list of aspirants, very high—and kept chanting it all the while marching her down the corridor for the HR. She didn’t clue into the situation until the HR asked her for a void check, to set up the electronic pay deposit into her account. There was a brief moment when she thought of staging a mini-protest but once she heard the reduced pay came with full benefits, she closed her mouth and signed all the paperwork. She told me that she would save a few hundred dollars a month on puffers alone—she had asthma. She was the resident global-journalist-in-the-wings. I wasn’t in the mood to admit to striving for anything yet. My lofty dreams vanished once those fateful words had sounded: “Our satellite office in Idaho.”

  “I’d like to keep my murders on home turf,” I said, managing a sickly smile so she’d not get insulted that I dissed her contribution.

  Emilie was an artist first and a journalist second. Her dream-job was to sit in a court-room of some high profile criminal case, sketching the accused and the jury and memorizing everything she heard. She had an eidetic memory and thin ethics when it came to furthering her career. She thought I should set my murders in resorts and Noah loved the idea of murder on the moving express—where moving meant any vehicle that was capable of exceeding the speed of sound.

  “I’m not going to be murdering anyone in the military, certainly not our jet pilots or worse—astronauts—and our employer derives a good chunk of revenue from travel industry and their advertisement. I don’t even think Ganz would allow me to smear the local tourist spots with murder,” I said.

  “It’s a blog. It’s fiction. It’s not like it’s going to be real murders. It’s entertainment,” Jake said what I did not want to hear. I didn’t get my degree to write for the tabloids; I wanted to be taken seriously as a journalist or a magazine staff contributor. I did not want to write a weekly horoscope, or do interviews with runway models and their deranged designers. I did not want to write eloquent obituaries as my father suggested in one of his suicidal moments. I did not even want to become a culinary critic. I wanted to be someone who attended press parties for altogether ten minutes before she had to excuse herself to go and write a breaking story about a human condition.

  “So I’m supposed to make murder entertaining?” I stared at Jake as if he was going to be my next victim, if only in digital format.

  “Interesting, Bree, you’re supposed to write a blog that people will want to read for many reasons. Why do you read about murders, whether local, national or global?” he asked.

  And that was the problem. I didn’t. I read about our economy, our politics, our emerging trends in literature and art—I read about everything except murder. Is that why Ganz approved my choice of topic for the blog? Was it to teach me a lesson…?

  I finally allowed my fingers to settle on the keyboard, acutely aware that I had a deadline, and all the while I wrote, I mumbled, “Be interesting, be creative, be original, be awake….”

  I met my deadline by killing a grocery store clerk—a no-name high-school student—in a small town Nebraska, with a metal drum that fell off a shelf just as the kid walked into the storage to get non-perishables to re-stock the store shelves. The container was filled with liquid floor cleaner used by the night-cleaning crew. The drum had been placed way back on the shelf and once it was taken down, it was usually emptied. The cleaners would pour its contents into half a dozen smaller containers they’d leave on the floor. However, until it was needed, it remained on the shelf, ten feet off the floor. The shelving didn’t tip or collapse but the local police had no reason to suspect anything else but an accident. The case remained as accidental death, and the kid’s parents hired a lawyer to see if it could be upgraded to industrial accident and thus negligence. They might have stood a chance of filing a law suit against the store owner, but they made one tiny error. They hired a private investigator with solid credentials. He discovered that the constant rumbling of trucks along the nearby highway set up such strong underground tremors that these were enough to jostle anything stored on the backroom shelves, including the heavy metal drum filled with a floor cleaner. And since no one entering the storage room had a reason to look up—unless they were the cleaners who’d have come specifically for the drum—its position dangerously close to the edge, went unnoticed.

  My first subscriber complained that I made the murder too easy. Would I get more subscribers and would they all complain…? My thoughts turned to examining the validity of my reader’s complaint. I thought I did well, considering the whole exercise took less than ten minutes to tap out on my keyboard. My contract called for one fictional article, posted to the blog. The theme depended on what the blog was about. If I’d gone for food review, I’d be required to write one creative recipe per week as my blog post. Maybe I should have picked something that required less…finesse.

  The criticism of a total stranger with a weird email address, stung me. The shrill sound that suddenly erupted from a saw horse standing next to the bean-bag chair, broke my trance.

  “What the…?” I went to find the archaic communication appliance. It was still attached to the jack-outlet with a chord. It wasn’t even a handset phone.

  “Yes,” I said, not bothering to consider how it sounded. However, karma found me quickly enough.

  “Correct me if I’m wrong but this is the NorthWest Ledger Publishing Corporation, a fully owned subsidiary of the great New York Times?” My boss’s long-distance reproach scoured my ear with its acidic tone.

  “Yes, sir. Sorry about that.” Normally I had my wits about me and in these kind of situations I offered a creative extrapolation of quasi-truth. This time I knew better. Ganz was not calling to listen to my excuses. He was calling to chew me out because I literally posted the blog minutes before the deadline.

  “I like your initiative. That was clever thinking. I’m glad you didn’t post the murder solution at the same time as the murder. Give it a couple of days and then post the solution,” he said and didn’t even bother to wish me continued luck.

  “Murder solution, murder solution,” I kept murmuring and then suddenly I woke up when it dawned on me that what I posted was an accident and that at no point in my blog-post-story did I as much as suggest murder. Yet not only my first subscriber but my boss took it to be murder. Where did I go wrong? Where did I go right?

  Two days later, surviving on coffee and muffins from the local bakery that rivaled CostMart because it was also the grocery store that doubled as the post office outlet and pharmacy and medical clinic and a dry cleaning store, I posted the solution to my ‘accidental’ murder.

  Ganz called again. “Not bad, Bree-Ann, not bad. I like the psychological angle. Both store clerks were high-school seniors. That’s your classic scenario. Two sets of testosterone-driven jocks, one local hottie with a mean streak and psychopathic tendencies who wants to see which one will do anything she asks and she asks each to murder the other.”

  He’d read it, no doubt about it, but if he wanted me to be impressed that he was keeping tabs on me, he had something else coming. I was about to hang up when he fired his demoralizing shot. “In the next one, don’t leave it to chance. Identify your victim up front and then set up the whole thing.”

  He got a chance to hang up on me because I was too stunned from realization that he simply did not get it. He may have read my blog-post but he did not get my solution. While my murder-of-the-week was shown to be a murder and not an accident, industrial or otherwise, the psychopathic local hottie was just your proverbial catalyst. She was a proxy, not the murderer. The metal drum could have fallen on jock number one or two; it all depended on who went to the storage room first. The actual killer was the person who sent the clerk into that storage room, at the right time, when a convoy of trucks was rolling down the highway. I wasn’t asked to make-up a motive but if I had to, it would have been easy. The killer could be anyone—the store owner, a delivery guy, a f
emale classmate who hated the hottie or the jocks—motive would have been easy. Anyone who’d frequented the store and had an ounce of brain would have been able to put two and two together—and come up with trucks rumbling down the highway and the tremors that shook the area. Ganz didn’t ask and I decided to let my first blog-post lie quietly in its electronic coffin. He was the boss and he got exactly what he wanted. I had to protect my pay check. The last thing I needed was to see my credit score plummet because of student loan delinquency.

  I was about to power down my desktop when a little envelope with spindly legs appeared on the bottom of the screen and spread its wings. An email arrived, probably from Ganz. It could be that he just realized what my solution was about and who was the murderer, or he could just want to ‘mentor’ me long distance to satisfy protocol. After all, I was an intern and interns were like lint—a necessary evil on a favorite garment. I caught the winged envelope before it flew away. When a single click did not produce expected results, I double clicked on it, thinking Ganz packed his email so full of emoticons it needed an extra spark to get it going.

  However, instead of the expected message my screen turned black. Thinking I had somehow unplugged the power-bar, I bent to a side when I heard an odd sound. It was perky and wet. I turned to see the percolator silent and unplugged on the counter by the window. The dripping sound was coming from my monitor. I wasn’t O/C but I did have a tendency to start counting when I heard a rhythmical sound. The fifth drip did not land but the sixth one did—on something solid that gave off a slight metallic ping. The next three drops landed with a splat, each one louder than the last and when I was about to bang the screen frame, another sound entered the curious symphony. It was a clink of a metal against glass. I’ve been to weddings when the guests did it to motivate the bride and groom into a kiss but this wasn’t celebratory clinking. It had a testy, cold feel to it. The sound stopped as abruptly as it started and another one replaced it. Someone was rubbing two metal objects together—a chef sharpening his knives. At first the rubbing motion was languid then it became faster and faster until it became indistinguishable from mechanical grinding. My hand on the mouse twitched as I struggled to guide the pointer where I wanted it—to get out of the trap. I was a fraction of an inch away when the sound of the chainsaw made me miss-hit. Not sure if it was a result of my action or if it was the next step in the bizarre sound show, the black screen started to fade. It remained black but acquired a strange texture that made the screen seem transparent. The chainsaw kept grinding against something hard until it crunched right through it. The sickening crunch at times overtook even the chainsaw pitch. Then just as suddenly as it started, the chainsaw cut out. I strained my ears, not sure what I should do. A part of me that was aware of my rapid heartbeat, wanted to yank the power bar out of the floor receptacle to kill the computer for good. But another part that kept trying to ignore the tightening chest and cold sweat rising on my forehead, wanted to see the charade play out.