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CHAPTER 3
JESSICA
Present Day
Jessica waved as her three friends, Fiona, Lori and Christie backed out of her driveway, each of them heading for their own homes. This past weekend had been the inaugural meeting of the Mystery Writers’ Murder Club. The idea for the group had been hatched three months previously at a reader event in Kennebunkport. Jessica had offered to host the first bi-monthly meeting.
The weekend had been fun, lively, and they’d done good work. Not only did they spur each other on in a kind of mini writing retreat, but they’d also solved a cold case, piecing together a forty-year-old mystery involving a missing person. Tracy Vintner had been the wife of an abusive spouse. The last time she’d been seen was in a Portland hospital recovering from one of her husband’s beatings. The working theory was that Tracy had unhooked her IVs and walked out of the hospital, never to be seen again.
They’d been able to track some of the plans she had put in place in order to escape her abusive ex, as had the police. Seven years to the day after she’d walked out unseen by hospital staff, the bastard had divorced her in absentia. Believing she was better off without him, the cops had done little to try and track her down.
“Well, they aren’t wrong,” said Fiona. “Trust me, I speak from experience. My ex never beat me, but he was emotionally abusive in the extreme. I say, let the poor woman have her escape.”
“I don’t disagree,” said Jessica. “I just don’t think that’s the end of it. He did little after the first week to try and find her. Abusers generally get obsessive about finding their victims if they manage to escape.”
Following what evidence they could find and talking to people who’d known her, they been able to piece together a probable and logical sequence of events after her disappearance. Put all together, they strongly suggested that Jessica had been right.
“So, he caught up with her?” asked Christie.
Jessica nodded. “I believe he did. Not only that, I think he killed her and hid her body in the foundation of the house they were building.”
“Nobody is going to let us tear up a foundation based on our thinking he did something…” started Lori.
“Yes, but the house has been condemned and is going to be torn down. If we can get the MCU…”
“MCU?” asked Christie, who was a recent transplant to Maine.
“The state’s Major Crimes Unit. Maine has so many small towns and villages, that with the exception of Portland and Bangor, all suspicious deaths and some crimes in towns that don’t have police departments are handled by the investigators that work for the state. Detective Wilder is one of their lead investigators, which was why he was called in at Kennebunkport,” explained Jessica, who’d been born and raised in Badger’s Drift.
“Do you think McSexy,” Fiona said, using the group’s nickname for the good-looking detective, “would be interested?”
“He would if Jessica was the one to tell him about it,” teased Lori.
“Detective Wilder is not interested in me in the least. The last time I saw him, he was making me comfortable on the couch.”
“Maybe,” said Christie, “but you did have the most contact with him, and I do think he was attracted to you.”
Jessica rolled her eyes. “I think he was annoyed more than anything else, but I will give him a call. In fact, new rule, if we find something worth turning over to the police, whoever is hosting the club meeting is the one who calls to make the case to the cops.”
Jess had then placed a call to Detective Wilder. At first, he’d sounded more annoyed than anything, but after he’d had a chance to read and analyze her theory, he had responded with a terse email of his own:
I think you may be onto something, and you’re right;
the time to take a look at that foundation is before it
gets destroyed and carted away, the bones along with it.
I’ll let you know what we find. Please let us handle it from here.
Thorn
He’d used his first name. That was interesting, and she tried not to read anything more into it. She also tried to convince herself she didn’t want to read anything more into it but failed miserably. The fact was, she hadn’t been as attracted to any man in a long time as she was to Detective Thorn Wilder. Apart from his impressively muscular body and stunningly beautiful face, the man had an interesting background and was incredibly intelligent. She’d never admit it to anyone, but she’d had more than one erotic fantasy about one of the state’s lead investigators.
She’d almost convinced herself she didn’t care when she was notified the police had found Tracy Vintner’s body and her husband or ex-husband had been arrested. They’d been right. Take that Detective McSexy.
* * *
A week later, Jessica stared at the screen of her laptop. Reading the same chapter over and over again was doing nothing to help what she refused to call writer’s block. Jessica Murdoch did not get writer’s block. She didn’t believe in it. She was famous for not believing in it. Yet here she sat in the early morning light in her office overlooking the harbor staring at a virtually blank screen.
