I aced my next test and could hardly wait for exams. Joseille, my roommate, was from New Orleans and made me experiment with ‘combination’ over-the-counter remedies. ‘quils were usually for getting a good night’s sleep, while ‘dryl and ‘deine based concoctions were to soothe my burning soul, as Joseille liked to say.

  “You just needed to relax, take the edge off of fear,” she’d said. “That’s all them pretty colored liquids do, chérie.”

  I believed her. A shot-glass or two of mellow-red liquid and a couple of gel caps washed down with fragrant strong coffee—it was all harmless, non-prescription drugs. It was also a cheap way to get ‘toxed before going to a night club. Especially once I got to New York where money did not go as far as it did in Syracuse.

  Once, when my boyfriend insisted on walking me all the way to my door which was three stories below the flat I shared with my roommates, I raised myself on tiptoes to kiss him and dropped my purse. Its contents spilled on the flagstones.

  “Are you like…a drugstore junkie?” Andrew asked, disbelieving as he picked up my supply of peace and courage from a bottle.

  I broke up with him the same night. He was a stock trader with a coke habit he thought I didn’t know about. I was too good for him anyway.

  I wasn’t a junkie. I just had a lot of stress in my life—and colds. I only went for my pretty liquids when I felt like the walls were closing me in or when the fear started to shut down my throat. It took the edge off any feeling of dread, inadequacy…failure.

  When Nicholas Ganz, the troll in charge of the internship program, met me in the briefing room, he motioned for me to sit down and then launched into his sales-pitch.

  “We expect our interns to be creative; to come up with creative ways of storytelling through video, text and social media. I took a look at your Columbia portfolio and I think you will be a perfect fit for our blog. You know, Times has more than a million digital subscribers. You’ll have the freedom to establish your presence through your blog in our Idaho satellite office and by the end of the two years, I expect your blog readership to at least reach if not surpass the digital subscribers that our Manhattan office boasts….” He went on and on, but after that horrible “our Idaho satellite office” I didn’t hear a thing.

  I had been grossly mislead. I had been lied to and kicked in my lady-balls. As a finalist, I thought that I’d get a lesser-paid internship position with the Times—in its New York offices—not outside-of-any-civilization, Idaho. I had so much faith in myself that I’d bought a used car, from campus classifieds. I was going to need it for all those field assignments…yeah, right.

  “It’s a blog, honey and we’re in a digital age. I’m sure you’ll get subscribers just flocking to read your….what is it you’re going to be writing?” My mother had asked when I called home to break the horrible news to her that I had a job, just not on this planet. I hadn’t decided yet. In fact, I had no idea what I should be writing about, in Kinematic, Idaho, especially since I was expected to reach (gasp) one million subscribers by the end of my internship.

  “I don’t know, Mom. The New York office left that up to me,” I said, trying not to sound the way I felt—dead and buried without honors.

  “Your father said the other day that retirement is murder on him. Why don’t you write about that?” Mom said.

  “Write about Dad’s retirement package that he should not have taken?” The idea had some appeal but Kinematic Town was actually an experimental settlement, an artificial suburb created when a developer ran out of bribes and imagination. My Kinematic readership, if it ever materialized, would be mostly suburban moms and their live-in domestics. Ganz might syndicate my blog in which case my audience would expand correspondingly; however he did not give me any indication that my status as an intern was on par with a columnist’s.

  “No, no, honey. I meant murder,” my mother said. My brother was ten years old than I was so in a sense I grew up an only child. I was always close to Mom and rarely if ever questioned her advice. That’s why two days later, I made a mental note to credit her with the idea every chance I got.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I wrote a short dedication to my mother and then plunged into my blog post number two a.k.a. murder in a small town nowhere, by one or more generic killers that get caught only if they confess. I was still smarting from my critic’s lashing.

  I decided to remain within the framework of my setting—a small town, somewhere on the edge of civilized suburbs. Not because the jaundiced critic kept harping on it, but because when I was a child, we used to drive down to Myrtle Beach on vacation. Since my brother was ten years older than I was, he always called ‘shotgun’ before it even occurred to me. He always sat up front next to Dad, while Mom would sit in the back with me, reading her book while I read mine. I picked South Carolina for my setting but my fictional small-town was further down the coast; not near Myrtle Beach. It wasn’t just my respect for the tourist industry of the region or my fear of losing my paid-internship. Murders that took place in or near resorts had boring motives—mostly robberies. I could have upgraded it to have a drug-dealing component but I didn’t want to take that route just yet. My mother was my blog subscriber which meant she read my blog-posts. My father in turn read my mother and the circle would be completed when she got back to me with his commentary on my choice of motive. If it did not contain a rock-solid psychological component, it just wasn’t real—or so my father would reason. I was just glad that my brother and his wife and two children, were in Japan, on a three-year IT contract, developing infrastructure for his employer’s American subsidiary. If he had been stateside, I’m sure Dad would have roped him into the circle and then I’d never finish writing my blog posts.

  Brunyeh was a hamlet, off 701 and just north of where the Great PeeDee River entered Wimyah Bay. I made sure there was no Brunyeh anywhere near Georgetown or for miles around the confluence of three rivers. I was writing a blog and it was entertainment but I couldn’t take a chance that memories of vacations in South Carolina would trick me into coming up with a real-time place. I picked my motive first—revenge. My victim came next. She was a local widow who took over running her husband’s gas station business when he died suddenly of a heart attack. There were no suspects because, just like my first murder, this one at first glance appeared to be a horrible accident. It was a night of a great storm and the widow ran outside to lock up the pumps and batten down the proverbial hatches, before the storm was upgraded to a full-force hurricane, when she was attacked by a ten-foot American alligator, presumably washed out by the heavy downpour from its natural environment some miles up the road. Her remains were found the next morning, scattered along the path leading to the marshy areas and away from the gas station, by the wildlife wardens working out of Wildlife Management Station, five miles north of Brunyeh. It went down as an accident. The police did search the area, trying to determine how the gator managed to get to the gas station, but there wasn’t much to see considering the hurricane and heavy rain washed away all signs that might have told them which way the gator came or even where he headed. The remains were scattered along a path that led to the marshes but that just meant the gator passed that way; not where he actually went. If not for an old-timer, a wildlife warden steps away from retirement, the police would have closed the case as an accident. I knew this part would appeal to my father. If it was up to him, he’d have a wise old-timer, experienced beyond belief, in every story. The conscientious warden always triple-checked his crews vehicle logs to make sure no one grew creative and put in for gas-mileage that wasn’t deserved. That’s how he found a truck, outfitted with a tank for transporting gators, had been missing for two hours from the yard—that was conveniently equipped with surveillance cameras.

  I knew my mother would say that this part was coincidence and coincidence should not play any part in a good murder story but I needed the surveillance cameras. I made it into a newly-equipped fleet yard such that the warden didn’t get a chance to tell his crews about them. I left the story on that cliff-hanger. I had the solution but I wasn’t required to post it until mid-week. The critic would probably harangue me about it but I didn’t have to fuel his sense of importance. I posted the blog and then settled for working out a couple of motive-scenarios. The one that appealed to me the most was a baby given up at birth for adoption. The way I shaped my murder-story it could be a boy or a girl; either was a good candidate to have grown up in a less-than-ideal environment, the kind that produced psychopaths hell-bent on finding their birth-mother and teaching her a lesson.

  Would my critic accuse me of being conventional? Did I care? I waited until six o’clock for a ping that would either give me another subscriber or another barrage of cold logic. My colleagues were heading out for a dinner on the town. In reality, they’d go to Frankie’s, the only diner within twenty miles, order the house special and then probably stop at CostMart on the way back, to pick up some groceries. Life in Kinematic, Idaho stopped hopping around ten p.m. Sometimes even sooner.

  I was about to close the laptop cover when I heard a ping. I closed my eyes and implored powers-that-be to have a new subscriber. Biting my lip, I scrolled down and sighed with relief. I did have a new subscriber—and no comments. Alligators made them click on that button every time…every time. I made a mental note to move down the coast for Georgia with my blog-post #3. Alligators had a great drawing power.

  I took my laptop with me. The trip to my trailer park took ten minutes. It would have taken half as long if I’d driven at the speed limit. However, for some reason when I drove in Idaho, whether the roads were paved or not, my foot did not want to press down the gas pedal. I drove like my grandfather who’d lose his license for good if the cops in his home town caught him speeding just one more time. Considering gramps was on the good side of eighty, he really wanted to hang on to his driver’s license. The trailer was equipped with a microwave oven. I was surprised to find it worked without blowing fuses—or setting the trailer on fire. CostMart had a wonderful selection of gourmet dinners—all frozen solid beyond any bacteria penetration. It’s what I liked about food that came out of a book-sized box—its safety.

  I sat down with my over-heated box of much-hated pasta, opened up my laptop—and my conscience woke up. I’d not only kept in touch with Mom all the way on my drive from New York to Idaho, but I’d called her when I was settled in my rural penthouse on concrete blocks. It was convenient to forget that I was that oddity that still had both parents—living under the same roof; convenient but not nice.

  I turned on my cell phone. My father had four cell-phone numbers and a corresponding number of cell phones. He claimed that this expensive habit was actually a safety precaution—to safeguard us, his family, from his clientele. He was a psychiatrist with an obsessive need to help those who had great disdain for the law of the land. I heard my brother say once that Dad was to common criminals what social security was to the seniors of our land—a safety net. Mom was the banker at home, but she never argued safety precautions and when a new family plan came out, she quietly consolidated three cell phone numbers under one umbrella and left my father his illusion of safeguarding his family. I suspected that when he retired, she added his so-called work number to the family plan such that there was really only one cell-group in our family.

  I called on his ‘work’ number.

  “Hi, Dad. I’m sorry it took me so long to call. I’ve been busy. How are you doing? I did call Mom from the road, you know, for safety reasons.”

  “Bree-Ann, you know I always encouraged you to be independent but within reason. Why are you writing a murder blog?” My father had an endearing habit of coming to a point in the shortest time possible.

  “It’s my job, Dad. I’m a journalist.”

  “Journalists don’t write murder blogs.”

  “Well, these days they do, Dad. It’s a different world out here…out there,” I quickly corrected myself because in reality, the world around me was very much my father’s style of living. When the customers and serving staff in the diner down the road where I picked up my grilled cheese asked you how you were doing, they actually expected you to tell them—at great length. It wasn’t just an empty phrase to them.

  “I just worry about you. You haven’t been out much in the real world, you know,” Dad said. I could just see his forehead creasing slow-motion as he contemplated the gravity of the wisdom he just unloaded as if it had been a gold brick.

  “Dad, I’m twenty-six, have four years of college and two years of graduate studies to my credit and I’ve dated more guys than my brother had on his rugby team.”

  “That’s precisely my point, sweetheart. Dated—which is not the same as relationship. I wish you would have stayed on the east coast.”

  Well, so did I but my input on the topic was not solicited. Neither were my sentiments on going to a place I’ve never heard of, in Idaho. The man whose face I never wanted to see again kept pumping my hand as if testing whether it would detach from my shoulder, all the while congratulating me on placing high on a list of candidates who were all losers. Before I could open my mouth and cry foul play, a steady pay check padlocked my mouth.

  “Dad, you know what, I still have some work to do. I’m like you these days, taking my work home…I have to run.”

  “Your brother never ran.”

  “He’s in Japan, Dad.”

  “He’s working, Bree-Ann. He has a wife and children to support.”

  “I’m thinking of getting a dog…or a cat…or a hamster. I’ve got to go, Dad. Bye. I’ll call when I’m more settled in,” I said hurriedly and cancelled the call. I shut it off so I could claim with clear conscience that I didn’t see a call come in…until I turned on the only appliance I couldn’t live with…or without. I will always believe that GPS was a brainchild of a neurotic parent who wanted to microchip his children and had to settle for buying them a smart phone.

  I could sit next to my Mother in the back seat for hours, while Dad drove with my brother beside him, and feel utterly, absolutely at peace—and happy. But all it took was a three minute phone call with my father and I was as wired as if I’d chugged the whole container of coffee at Starbucks—from the spout. I made the mistake of leaving my laptop on.

  The ping woke me up as if it was a gong—or a ship’s bell. It took me a while to rub the sleep out of my eyes and see it was just after three o’clock in the morning. I swore and was about to shut off the laptop when a force I didn’t understand halted my hand. Instead, the same force guided it to the mouse I liked to use with the laptop and after that it was just a reflex to log in and scroll.

  “A foster kid grows up to be a wild life warden in South Carolina for the sole purpose of revenge against his biological mother who gave him up—did I get it right?” I read and a dark suspicion started to drill in the back of my head. Was someone hacking into my desktop? That’s where all my research was stored.

  “I haven’t posted the solution yet,” I wrote back, uneasy for many reasons. Why was I letting this nutcase know that I was awake and at my computer—at three o’clock in the morning? My father’s basic safety rule was: Don’t let them know your habits. Be unpredictable.

  “You will—soon enough since your boss wants to see it. It’s feeble, you know.”

  “Then unsubscribe since reading my blog obviously annoys you,” I did what would surely see me fired if Ganz read it.

  My critic ignored it. “The case was solved in forty-eight hours,” he typed back.

  What case? What was he talking about? My fictional murder was an amalgam of several murder cases I researched in the course of the last four days. None of them took place in South Carolina.

  Against my better judgment I typed back, “I don’t write about actual cases. My murders are all fictional.”

  “Keep telling yourself that and who knows, you might even be able to sleep at night.”

  “I don’t understand your hostility. I repeat, if it bothers you to read my blog, un-subscribe.”

  “Carmen Batista, from the Dominican, was a domestic for a family in Naples, Florida. She was careful not to walk across the field in the back of her employer’s property, especially if the area experienced heavy rains. Southern Florida has the distinction of being home to American alligators as well as American crocodiles. They co-exist, peacefully…for the most part. That afternoon, Carmen was running late for her hair salon appointment and took the shortcut. She was attacked by a crocodile that waded out of the nearby marshes. Everglades Wildlife Wardens caught up to the reptile but recovered very little of Carmen’s remains. It went down as a horrible tragedy, an accident. It would have remained as such if not for the insurance company that contacted the local police when two parties in a span of two days contacted them to claim Carmen’s life insurance that her employer took out—a cool two hundred thousand dollars.”

  “You obviously enjoy doing research along these lines,” I wrote. “And I applaud your interest but this is a blog. The comments section is not exactly an interactive platform. It is really just to leave a brief comment. If you need to chat with someone, then find a chatroom group and join. I’m sure there are many people out there who would appreciate your knowledge.” I sent the comment and unchecked the feature that let me know with a ping whenever a new comment or a new subscriber came in.

  I wasted the rest of the night trying to come up with a new killer and a new motive. When the morning clocked in I had a short list of suspects. The croc was right at the top of it.