(From The Overlook Murder)
Meet Mr. Chips the groundhog and Ms. Betsy the black bear.
Earlier that morning when Bill peered over his balcony railing, Mr. Chips was nowhere to be found. Perhaps the groundhog had slept in. After the interview with Frieda Chang, Bill strolled down to his condo building to get his car. Once he passed Cindy’s building, he glanced right toward the ridge’s edge and spied Mr. Chips nibbling on greens near his burrow entrance.
Bill waved. “Wait there, Mr. Chips. Be right back.”
Inside his condo, Bill picked up a bright red beefsteak tomato and then hustled outside again. Having set the goal of getting a little closer to Mr. Chips every day, Bill now hoped to cross the ten-foot line. He held the tomato high and jiggled it to capture the groundhog’s attention. Mr. Chips stood straight and dropped the greens.
Bill then repeated the routine he had established. Slow steps toward the target. No sudden moves. Everything was going according to plan. Twenty feet. Fifteen feet. Ten feet. Bill’s heartbeat accelerated.
But suddenly, Mr. Chips stood straight and turned his head as if to listen for something. Bill frowned.
“Take it easy, Mr. Chips. I have a nice fat fruit here, but you only get it when you let me come a few feet closer.”
It was as if Bill had said nothing at all. Mr. Chips turned his head farther to the side and lifted his nose to sniff. What in the heck? Mr. Chips pulled his head back, and then his whole body jerked. In the next instant, the groundhog rushed to his burrow entrance and disappeared.
“Dang it,” said Bill. He stomped toward the entrance and leaned over to snarl. “What is your problem? You were happy to wait yesterday. Don’t think I’ll drop this tomato for you to eat at your leisure. These things aren’t free, you know. This is a two-way street.”
But then Bill heard a noise coming from beyond the drop-off of the hill. The grasses on the slope rustled. He sensed movement and got the unmistakable impression that another life-form approached. Then, a dark furry form rose above the slope not ten feet away. His heart pounded, and his eyes bulged.
Holy Peter, Paul, and Mary! It’s a bear!
Bill dropped the tomato and fell on his butt in the grass.
But the bear kept coming. The mammal moved leisurely, one huge paw in front of the other. The black omnivore would reach Bill in a few instants.
Bill crab-walked backward, his eyes glued to the bear. The bear sniffed Mr. Chips’s burrow entrance, pawed at it once, and noticed the tomato. Bill kept scrambling, his arms and legs a blur. The bear sat on its haunch, grabbed the tomato with both hands, and lifted it for a close inspection. Bill managed to stand and continued to increase his margin of safety. After sniffing the fruit, the bear decided it made for a suitable snack, and the tomato disappeared down the bear’s gullet in the next instant.
Wait a minute. Bill knew that bear. The same varmint had stolen his coffee and danish a few months earlier. Bill didn’t harbor any ill will, although he was glad the bear had settled for Mr. Chips’s tomato. On that other occasion, Bill’s neighbor, Mrs. Spooner, had laughed at Bill and delighted at the bear’s presence. She even had a name for the bear. What was it?
Ms. Betsy.
Bill waved. “H-hey, Ms. Betsy.”
In answer to his greeting, Ms. Betsy rose and ambled toward him.
“You can stay there if you want to,” said Bill.
Nothing doing. Ms. Betsy had places to go, and Bill stood in her path. He hustled to the sidewalk and then up the steps toward his building. Fortunately, Ms. Betsy paid him no mind. She sniffed his car door but apparently detected nothing of interest. After examining two other vehicles in the lot, she made her way into the woods and was soon gone from view.
Inside his condo, Bill poured a glass of water and sat at his dining table to wait for his heart to settle. Good lord. He lived in a wilderness area. What had ever possessed him to leave the safe confines of a civilized city? But in the next moment, he knew the answer. No matter how hard humans tried to create artificial structures of beauty, the results paled compared to what lay a few strides from his door. City dwellers scurried about in a frantic search for their next thrill. Better to take a walk in the woods.
Chapter One (1 page)
Near sunset, a soft breeze rustled maple leaves on a suburban street in Charlottesville. The homes were brick, some painted white and others a natural red. Idle chimneys extended above the shingled roofs. A large two-story home was decorated with shuttered windows and a dark front door. On either side of the house, camellia bushes and holly trees provided lush greenery while summer flowers bloomed brightly in the landscaped yard: chrysanthemum, pansy, begonia, and foxglove.
A jogger rounded the street’s corner at an easy pace. The residents were either away or inside, and no one noticed the jogger. Not that anything alarming was to be seen, for the jogger regularly passed that way.
Digitalis purpurea.
In the eighteenth century, an English herbalist made a concoction of twenty different herbs that promised to rid the body of unwanted fluids. A doctor named William Withering identified the concoction’s magic herb as foxglove, and he began using it experimentally with patients who suffered from dropsy. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. The dose spelled the difference between medicine and poison.
The jogger paused, kneeled over a shoelace, and surveyed both sides of the empty street. After removing small scissors from a pocket, the jogger dashed across the lush lawn to the flower bed.
Stay calm. Make sure you get enough.
The jogger quickly harvested green leaves from the blooming foxglove plants. Ten. Twenty. Thirty. The jogger placed the leaves in a plastic bag and then tucked the bag into a pocket.
These will help things along.
With a quick glance to verify no one was watching, the jogger returned to the street and soon disappeared around the next corner.
***
Thank you for reading Chapter One of The Overlook Murder, book two of The Wintergreen Mystery Series.
Available on Amazon
Meet the First Murder Suspect (1 page)
Cindy drove Bill down Laurel Springs Drive to a point where a uniformed officer directed traffic around a growing number of vehicles parked on the side of the road. Two Wintergreen police squad cars were already there, along with Evan Hale’s Land Rover, a Ford Escape, and Alex Sharp’s pickup. Cindy stopped her SUV briefly, and Bill hopped out. Interim Chief Alex Sharp had just arrived, and the two men met at the trailhead.
The Old Appalachian Trail branched from the road in a southwesterly direction. Speckles of sunlight broke through the forest canopy high above them. The air smelled lightly of decaying leaves from prior seasons. Lichen-patched boulders the size of cars and tiny houses lay on the mountainside, discarded carelessly by an ice age’s retreating glaciers.
Obviously anxious, Alex set a quick pace on the trail. He wore khakis and a light jacket, making Bill feel self-conscious in his catering outfit. The trail followed the contour of the mountain on a generally upward slope. The overlook was a little more than half a mile from the road, and they covered the distance in ten minutes. As they drew nearer, sunlight from the right brightened the forest.
Damian Susskind’s guests—Tanya Stafford, Lacey Akin, and Evan Hale—stood in a quiet cluster forty feet from the overlook with an officer named Rodríguez. Their faces were drawn. Lacey looked pale.
Alex waved Rodríguez over.
“What’s the story, José?” said Alex.
José pointed to where the trail continued south. “Officers Gentry and Hill went to search for a way to the bottom to see what can be done. EMS is on the way—should get here soon.” José consulted notes on his phone. “It’s not exactly clear what happened. The victim fell off the cliff—they all agree on that. But they were not together when he fell. The man—Hale—was standing back in the woods with Lacey Akin. Everyone agrees that Tanya Stafford and Susskind were out there on the rock.”
An offshoot from the main trail broke through the trees and met the solid rock at the mountain’s edge. The overlook itself was a ledge that ended abruptly in the open air. It stood alone now and peaceful, as if to proclaim its innocence—gravity deserved the blame. Wind blew up the mountainside and rustled the treetops.
“Here’s the real problem,” said José. “According to Lacey Akin, Tanya Stafford pushed Susskind off the cliff.”