CHAPTER SIX

  I was a firm believer in the maxim that you can never go back to yesterday. It’s how my father started most of his therapy sessions, just that it had a vastly different meaning for his incarcerated clients than it did for me.

  Right or wrong, feeble or not, murder number two was going to be justly pinned on the killer-son of the victim. I would not relocate my fictional murder to Florida. I wanted it to stay in South Carolina therefore the killer would be a gator and not a croc. There was no insurance issue. There was a gas station and I supposed that could bring in a tidy sum but my widow was not offered as bait to the alligator because of money. The motive was revenge and the case would stand. I could have waited another day before posting the solution but I just wanted to get it over with.

  I had turned off notification but eventually I would have to go and see if there was any reaction to my solution. I spent the day working on blog-post three. By four o’clock, I couldn’t stand it any longer and logged into the blog site. I had six new subscribers. Scrolling down told me that none of them felt like leaving comments. I felt vaguely disappointed. Then I checked the subscribers’ list. be.paradigm did not un-subscribe but neither did he leave a comment. His tempest in a teacup could be over. I didn’t validate his input by coming up with a different solution. Then again, his input was unsolicited.

  At five o’clock, out of the blue, Melina asked me how many subscribers I had. When I told her she clucked her tongue. “You need global appeal to grow your readership numbers,” she said. Journalists are not the most talkative people amongst themselves. There’s always that fear about someone else scooping your story, but our group of rejects took that habit to the extreme. Other than the requisite morning greeting, we could easily go through the day without saying a word to one another. We talked to our laptops and made gestures at our desktops, but that was the sum total of our work environment communication. That’s why I was a little surprised when I saw an email from Jake. He sat ten feet away. It was the end of the work day for all of us. He could have broken with the protocol and just talked to me…or at least whistled to get my attention. Were two weeks of dedicated avoidance enough to have become ingrained habit?

  I clicked on the email. “I served it to you on a platter. All you had to do is follow the script. You will regret not listening to my advice.” There was more but it took a few seconds to sink in before the rest of the words swam out of focus. How did my nutcase subscriber manage to hi-jack my colleague’s work email account and use it to send me this threatening note?

  “Jake,” I leaned to the side. “Humor me and send me a test email. My email’s doing strange things. I just want to see if yours comes through.”

  Email in Idaho had to take several detours, probably to the neighboring states, before it arrived ten feet across the room. It took that long for Jake’s email to click in. When it did, I saw right away that it was identical to the one from my sinister critic.

  “Thanks. Seems to be working fine now,” I said.

  “You know, when you humor someone you’re actually doing them a favor,” he said. I steeled myself against what would come next.

  The rest of my colleague were attuned to the floor drama about to unfold.

  “Come on, Bree-Ann, let’s go out to dinner—all of us, as a team,” Melina said.

  “If you find a trailer the size of a mess hall, I’ll get a takeout and I’ll come,” I said. “I don’t want to go and sit in Frankie’s for a couple of hours. It’s depressing enough when I have to run in to get my take-out.”

  “There’s a McDonald’s counter at CostMart,” Noah piped up.

  I laughed and shook my head. “I have to get cracking on murder number three. This isn’t coming to me as naturally as I thought it would. One murder is interesting. Two are barely memorable and three…well, I’m struggling here, guys,” I said, adding a hand swipe across my forehead to heighten the drama.

  “We’re not going to Frankie’s,” Jake said. “It’s Wednesday. We’re going for ribs. Come on out to the Paradigm and maybe you’ll find a new way to kill off another innocent victim,” he said.

  “Paradigm? “ My breath stuck in my throat. “What’s a paradigm?”

  Jake grinned at me. “You want a definition or…?”

  I repeated my question, hoping nothing alarming showed on my face.

  “That’s the name of the restaurant with a well-stocked bar—didn’t you know?”

  I didn’t because I didn’t want to know. Now that I did, I knew why I didn’t want to know.

  “You know that’s double validation…?” I had to shift the focus before my colleagues grew suspicious.

  “Paradigm? No that’s….”

  I interrupted. “No, Jake. This place is going to chew you up and spit you out a bobble-head. You’ll never make it on the global journalistic scene. Innocent victim. All victims are innocent; that’s why they’re victims. Now, go and leave me so I can do my job.”

  “Not all victims are innocent,” he said, shrugging when I stared at him.

  “Really?” I started to think about what he said.

  “Yeah. Some people just beg to be killed.”

  “Really?” He was on to something and I could use it as my skip-point to write my weekly penance.

  “Well, for example, ‘The Trapper.’ That was a couple of years back, New York upstate; he was a victim that was not innocent. He deserved to be killed,” he said.

  “The Trapper,” was an idiot-father who wanted to rid his neighbourhood of rats and kept leaving rat-poison-pills wrapped in candy-wrappers in the alleys that school children used as shortcuts to the local school. He had approached the local Chamber of Commerce with a proposal that they hire an exterminator on contract and keep him until all the rats were gone from the mostly rural community. He was recommended for psychiatric assessment. Unfortunately the local health clinic did not have a competent psychiatrist on site, not even a counselor, and failed miserably in serving the disturbed citizen. Five children died before one of the bereaved fathers took the matter into his own hands. During the autopsy, the coroner found “Trapper’s” stomach full of candy-wrappers that he used to conceal his rat poison.

  “Okay. I take it back. Not all victims are innocent and there are some people who just beg to be killed but I can’t write my weekly post based on that kind of scenario, Jake. Ganz would fire me and I need to hang on to this posting for its full duration—two years and then I’ll be able to kick the Times where it will leave my boot imprint,” I said.

  “Your blog is supposed to make readers come see and read—‘C-Murder of the Week,’ so any imaginative murder will fit the theme,” he maintained.

  The problem was that I had a subscriber who was not going to let me write much fiction. He wanted to supply me with real murder cases and that was the one thing I couldn’t do.

  “C-Murder of the Week, Blog Post number 3, and it’s time for…maybe a local spa murder?” I said, un-focusing from my inward gazing. I just wanted them gone so I could do a search on this local eatery with a name that started haunting me the moment I posted my first work assignment.

  “It’s spring. We’re in Idaho. A local-spa murder might just be the thing, Bree,” Jake said. In two weeks I managed to snare one nutcase and five normal subscribers, not counting my mother. At this rate, the end of the two-year internship would see me with…maybe a couple of hundred subscribers, tops. Would that be enough to put down on my resume or would I have to slink in shame and look for employment in humble places like local radio stations run by volunteers? I had planned to blitz all the major TV networks, radio networks, and any public media outlet that was a ‘biggie’ in communications, with my fat resume from the Times. I had carefully constructed a schedule that would see me sending my resume to the Wall Street Journal, Newsweek, Fortune magazine, Environment & Energy, Reuters, CNN, The Washington Post and others that would further the career of the twenty-six year old New York Times intern.

  I had planned…and knew that I would have to un-plan if I wanted to survive but I just wasn’t ready to shake hands with reality…yet.

  “No, no, no, Jake,” I said, suddenly bone weary. “Idaho is a hundred miles that way,” I pointed at the window whose view was forever obscured by the microwave tower. “It’s called Boise. And a hundred miles the other way. That’s called Pocatello. Where we are is…Chateau D’If.”

  “Then let’s break out,” Melina said already pulling back my chair. “You’ll like Paradigm. It’s very homey.”

  “And on Wednesday night, you’ll get only five or six bikers dropping by for ribs and beer,” Jake remarked, slinging his jean jacket over his shoulder.

  “Coming?” Emilie asked, walking for the door. She carried her art-bag. She’d probably sit through dinner, sketching the patrons of the homey culinary palace.

  My first subscriber’s be.paradigm email sculpted in my head. “Yep, I’m coming guys.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Jake waited for me to catch up. “Only five bikes,” I remarked to him. The others have already gone inside.

  “It’s not a bike gang, if that’s what you worry about.”

  I worried about subscribers who bullied me into taking them on as partners in my blog venture, not gangs.

  “They all look expensive,” I said.

  “A lot of young guys with money come here for ribs and beer,” he said.

  “Are you serious?” I just couldn’t see anyone with money wasting it on “Death with Wings” as my father called a motorcycle. Considering a lot of Dad’s clients were in a bike gang, he probably knew what he was talking about.

  “The guy who owns this place used to be a cop in Seattle. He comes from old money; lumber mills, timber, power generation—things like that. His family’s up in Boise but this place…well, it’s kind of therapeutic to have it here.”

  “Is the old money also behind the development of Kinematic-strangeville?”

  “Not sure, could be but I kind of doubt it.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged. “I did a bit of research into this place when I found out I’d be posted here. A pharmaceutical company applied to come here and put up their manufacturing plant where Kinematic sprawls. The local farmers petitioned the Congressman to stop it and building a few dozen experimental mobile dwellings that can be uprooted and relocated somewhere else, was the enterprising solution. It stopped the plant.”

  Well, if that was the case, then the Kinematic experiment deserved my support. I made a mental note to bring a bit of local history into my murder blog.

  “Mind you, a year later, when the chemical company did the same thing, the locals ran out of steam. SaniPure Chemicals promised the Mayor that they would keep their operation small-scale. They forgot to mention that their promise came with an expiration date,” Jake said, with a mirthless chuckle.

  He ushered me in ahead of him. It was the only reason why I ‘fell into’ the environment rather than entered it with caution.

  The Paradigm should have been re-named paradox. It was warm outside and should have been stifling hot inside, without air-conditioning, and yet it was comfortably cool. The dining room was full of people and yet the place felt empty, airy. The people’s chatter sounded cheerful without being noisy. It was hard to tell the bike owners because no one looked rough or burly or even seedy. They were just…regular people, out to have a decent dinner of ribs and beer. I expected a smoky atmosphere and corresponding stench of tobacco, regardless of today’s health trends. The air did smell of smoke but it was the woodsy kind; the kind that you get when you throw a handful of pine needles on a campfire because your brother told you it would wake up the fairy. I expected to be assaulted by music that would make my mother squirm and hide her birth certificate, but instead, there was nothing but a subdued murmur of voices from those patrons that sat at fairly normal looking round tables. The servers were women, wearing jeans, t-shirts and white half-aprons. They were perhaps a bit older than me but not so much that they’d not want anyone looking over their shoulder at their driver’s licence. It was a bar in a rural area, without the steel and polished sophistication of its metropolitan cousins, but it wasn’t a caricature of anything. It had a homey feel to it and though I’d never turn my back to anyone in any drinking establishment, I felt that I didn’t have to worry so much about protecting it here, in Kinematic Town, Idaho. I didn’t see any obvious signs of lighting and yet there were few shadows. The only thing that comforted my tortured mind was the bar itself. It was made from pine planks, they were neither rough nor hewn but nicely polished, even inviting. And so was the bartender. He waved me on then slapped the white dish cloth back over his left shoulder and pointed at the table where my colleagues sat—playing cards and drinking beer from the bottles. Jake seemed to be bending down ever few seconds and peering under the table. I wondered whether he thought his colleagues were cheating.

  “Isn’t that illegal?” I mumbled because I didn’t like it when my stereotypes turned on me and laughed.

  “To your left is my dining room,” he said. “That’s where folks who come in to get fed sit and drink until it’s all gone. Then they go home, put their kids to bed, make love to their wives and get up in the morning to go to work. That’s the way the life works, for the most part anyway. The other side—see that barrel standing by the wall,” the bartender invited me with his finger to follow where he was pointing. “That’s the great divide.”

  “What’s it dividing?” I just couldn’t muster enough enthusiasm for the place, even if it was not what I expected—a dive.

  “My living quarters from my place of business.”

  I stared at him, trying to see whether he was laughing at me.

  He nodded. “Really, that’s the way we do things here. We don’t commute to work if we don’t have to.”

  “You live past that point and the table is actually your…what? A kitchen table?’

  “Something like that; but you can go over and introduce yourself to my boys. They don’t bite…unless I tell them to. They’re kind of partial to Jake as well; take treats from him all the time. I’ll have to have a chat with them about it. Don’t want them getting all lazy and comfortable,” he said, pulling back on a smile that made me wonder whether he was being straight with me or whether he was just ‘initiating’ me since it was my first time in his fine, strange establishment.

  I knew he was waiting for me to ask about his ‘boys’, but I felt contrary, though I couldn’t quite put my finger on what was bothering me. I’ve never been to a bar like the Paradigm. It was…almost homey. It was making it hard to hate it.

  “Do you draw a curtain across when you…come home from work?” I asked, not sure if I wanted to stay. I suspected his ‘boys’ were the German Shepherds that Jake told me about; if that were the case, then I should stay away from the table. I was a cat person.

  He must have seen my indecision and turned to business. “What do you want to be tonight—a paying customer or my guest?”

  “I don’t know you.” I unslung my satchel purse from my shoulder and set it down on the bar. There was just a slight clink but I still cringed. I should have bought a thicker-leather purse in New York. Or a leather knapsack. I wasn’t going to find one out here, that’s for sure.

  “I on the other hand knew who you were the moment Jake ushered you inside,” he said and this time I clearly heard his snicker. I decided that I would play his game. After all, the only reason why I came was because his establishment figured in the email address of the subscriber who was harassing me; possibly a nutcase.

  I started with a deep, intense scrutiny that should have at least wounded his manhood, if not killed it. He was like his bar, rough and polished at the same time. His haircut was probably self-inflicted or he could have just liked wearing his hair longer and uneven in the front, believing that a man’s forehead should sport a lock of hair. I wanted to disagree but for some reason it suited him. Most men I dated back in New York favored slicked hair styles. The wind-blown look was out. Unfortunately, slicked look prohibited hands-rowing through the man’s hair and that’s exactly what my hands craved when they were near a man’s head—tussling.

  “Well, did you find it?” I heard him and unfocused.

  He looked unfazed by my obvious scrutiny. “Find what?”

  “My name, tattooed on my forehead. You did see the bikes outside, right?”

  “I was looking for a barcode,” I shot back. “And yes, I did see the bikes. Are they yours?”

  “Only one of them. Care to guess which one?”

  “No.” I returned to my scrutiny.

  “If you’re looking for a bar code, you’re searching the wrong shelf. What will you have—on the house since it’s your first time in my establishment?”

  “You’re the owner? The bar is yours?” I suspected it but was still taken aback. He was my age, maybe a bit older, but certainly not old enough to own anything—yet. Then again, Jake did say he came from old money. His family’s fortune was probably all around me.

  “Sure is. What are you drinking?”

  “Coffee,” I mumbled. I remembered what Jake said about old money behind the place with a strange name. Was I looking at old money…its younger version, anyway?

  “Not planning to sleep tonight?”

  I shook my head and sat down on a bar stool that was surprisingly comfortable and not wobbly at all. “Hi, I’m Bree-Ann Carver, an intern working out of my employer’s Idaho satellite office.” I stretched out my hand. He took it, shook it wordlessly and went to pour me a cup of coffee. He returned with the coffee and his name.

  “I’m Ben Doublinth, the barkeep and owner of this fine establishment. And since we’re talking ownership, I also own a gas station and service garage downtown, so my bike can enjoy the best of service. So, why have you been avoiding Paradigm and what do you think of it now, that you’ve actually set a foot in it?”