Crime, Thrillers & Mystery / Skeletons (Analysis)
New Englanders are known for a lot of things. Supposedly, we’ve all been raised on lobster rolls, whoopee pies, and the belief that rooting for the Red Sox is as much a religious experience as arriving in your Sunday best at Father McLeary’s house of worship. Bostonians have instantly recognizable accents, as do the old timers living in the backwoods of Maine and Vermont. There have always been arguments over who the flatlanders are and whether or not we should count Connecticut as anything other than a bastard step-child. The tourists love our tiny, idyllic towns and the locals hate the tourists but secretly love their money. We’re a close knit group, clannish in the same way many of our ancestors were, and we’re suspicious of outsiders – especially outsiders who reek of the city and ask stupid questions about Starbucks and Wi-Fi.
But the thing New Englanders are most known for, the thing they’ve written books on and produced movies about, is our ability to keep secrets as tightly wrapped and hidden away as next year’s Christmas presents. It’s genetically coded into our DNA like hair color and lunch meat preference. Every town has its fair share of secrets, skeletons that crowd the closets of the former prom queen, track star, and town councilman.
It shouldn’t be too surprising, then, that on occasion those skeletons spill out into the hallway and make a mess of things. Then again, when they do, the phone at my office – Abby Sheppard, Private Investigator – has a tendency to ring and my bank account to rebound from its sudden brush with anorexia. So honestly, who am I to complain?
*
She couldn’t have been much older than fifteen, sixteen at the most. Her black hair was little more than a bad dye job, a fact that would have been easily discernable even if she hadn’t been naked and sprawled out against the riverbed for the world to see. There was a trail of blood along her abdomen and it ran to the right, down and away from her bellybutton. I could just barely make out the remnants of a butterfly bellybutton ring and a small part of me – the part that’s easily disgusted and that I tend to ignore – gagged just a little.
‘Who found her?’ Joe Sampson, the only homicide detective within a fifty mile radius, asked from his crouched position near the girl’s head. He’d gotten here only a couple of minutes before me and if the underlying tone of annoyance in his voice was any indication, he wasn’t thrilled that I’d been called in on it.
Not to self – never work with your ex-husband. The paycheck just isn’t worth the headache.
‘Some hikers. Poor bastards came down to the river to cool off, found her spread eagle, and hi-tailed it for the guard shack a mile or so up the road.’ Amos Greene looked hotter than an Italian sausage in his Sheriff’s uniform and about as uncomfortable as one, too. He wiped at his bald head with a red checkered handkerchief and frowned at Joe. ‘I really don’t like finding dead girls in my woods, Joe.’
Joe didn’t say anything, but I could tell from the look on his face that he wasn’t all that thrilled, either. It was close to ninety in the shade, the humidity hadn’t broken in two weeks, and if we went a day longer without rain the National forests were going to spontaneously combust up and down the coast of Maine. Top it off with a dead teenager and I could wholeheartedly understand Joe’s unhappiness.
I was sharing it at the moment, considering the dead girl was the daughter of my client.
‘You’re sure this is Harry Beaumont’s daughter?’ Joe asked and I nodded. He hung his head and stared at the ground. ‘Shit.’
Harry Beaumont was the wealthiest man outside of Portland and when his daughter Zoë went missing a month or so earlier, he called me to investigate. At the time, I wasn’t sure why, considering the only cases I’d taken in my five years as a private investigator had involved adulterous men and prostitutes, but I was staring at a dwindling bank account and an overdue rent notice so when Mr. Beaumont arrived in my office with a check containing more zeros than I’d seen in years, I couldn’t say no. I wanted to – every fiber in my being wanted to – but I didn’t. He thought that she might have run away from home, had told the police that suspicion, and had been rewarded with a business card and a promise that the staties would keep in touch, should they find out anything of substance. In a month’s time, the State Police hadn’t turned up anything, and now, on an insanely hot August day, I’d found Zoë Beaumont and I desperately wished I hadn’t.
*
I spent the remainder of what was supposed to be my day off going through the bureaucratic motions with Joe and Amos and, thankfully, was spared from having to break the news to Harry when Amos decided he should be the one to go up to the big old house on the hill and tell the richest man in western Maine that his daughter was dead. I didn’t envy him, but I was certainly grateful to him. He left Joe and me sitting in the gloriously air conditioned station with coffee cups and blank looks on our faces.
‘Why did Harry hire you?’ Joe asked and I heard the confusion in his voice.
‘I realize we’ve never actually gotten along, but come on, Joe. I’m good at what I do.’
He frowned at me. ‘I never said you weren’t. I’m more asking why, out of the hundreds of PIs in this state, and just over the line in New Hampshire, he happened to choose the one with the least experience in finding missing kids.’
I didn’t feel it necessary to tell him that I’d had that thought more than once in the last few weeks. We sat and pondered his statement awhile before the silence got to us. I was the first to crack, as usual.
‘Any preliminaries from the M.E.?’ I asked.
‘Not really. Doc Karn found hemorrhaging in her eyes and bruising on her throat, which suggests she was strangled. She also had a bunch of defensive wounds on her hands.’ He sighed, spun his paper coffee cup around in a circle on the table. ‘I really hate small town homicides.’
‘You’re the one who wanted to work on the statewide taskforce,’ I reminded him.
He smiled slightly. ‘I know. Sunk my own ship, didn’t I?’
I didn’t say anything but I let my smile convey my agreement.
Zoë Beaumont had been an honors student up until six months before she’d disappeared from her father’s house in the hills. Gloria Beaumont, Zoë’s mother, had passed away from breast cancer a few years earlier, so when I started my investigation I realized I’d have to go outside the mansion for information. I’d interviewed her teachers at the prestigious Hawthorn Academy in Bangor and had come away with the sense that something in Zoë had broken overnight. She’d dyed her blonde hair black, had dropped her popular friends for a crowd that was known for breaking rules and getting suspended, and had slowly, but surely, failed most of her classes. The picture that the teachers at Hawthorn painted for me was a far cry from the photograph Harry gave me the day he hired me and the dead girl by the river bore only a faint resemblance to the Zoë Beaumont of the family photo albums.
Something didn’t make sense.
‘I know what you’re thinking,’ Joe said and I simply arched an eyebrow at him. ‘You’re thinking it doesn’t make sense. A bright and talented young girl goes haywire, skips out on school and daddy, and ends up naked and dead by the river in one of the most remote parts of Baxter State Park. You’re wondering where the links are, what connects one event to the next.’
I was also wondering when he got so good at reading my mind, considering he’d been awful at it when we’d been married.
‘Harry Beaumont reported his daughter missing on Monday morning. Her summer school math teacher says that she saw Zoë leave school on Friday and get into the family car, a black Bentley that’s driven by Morris Richards, Harry Beaumont’s driver.’
‘What are you heading towards, Abby?’
I started making invisible patterns with my fingertips on the tabletop, drawing connecting lines from points that only I could see.
‘There are two days that are unaccounted for between when Richards picked Zoë up from school on Friday and when Harry reported her missing on Monday.’ I was on to something and while I had an idea of who killed Zoë Beaumont, I still needed a why. ‘Something happened in those two days, something that led to Zoë’s disappearance and eventual death.’
Joe sighed. ‘Let’s start at the school.’
*
People do bad things for what they sometimes think are good reasons.
If you were a wealthy man with a reputation to uphold, what would you do to keep yourself out of the tabloids and publicity pages? How far would you go to make sure that the world you’d built for yourself wasn’t torn down around you because of scandals and poorly handled missteps? The motive for Zoë’s death was hidden in the answers to those questions, and when her teachers pointed Joe and me in the direction of drugs and addiction, the pieces began to fall into place. I made a quick phone call to a friend in the Berkshires in Massachusetts and quickly found the answers I was looking for.
A couple of days after we found Zoë’s body, Amos called Harry Beaumont and got him to agree to meet me and Joe at my office on Main Street. He arrived with the belief that I was going to apologize for not having found Zoë in time, which I did out of respect for the dead. He brought with him a check for the remainder of my fee and I convinced him to sit and stay awhile, to have a cup of coffee with his former private investigator and the local homicide detective. We were halfway through our coffees when I dropped the bomb I’d been working on since two days earlier.
‘When did you realize Zoë was addicted to cocaine?’ I asked and Harry Beaumont’s façade of the caring, grieving father slipped ever so slightly. ‘Before or after she disappeared?’
‘Before.’ He frowned. ‘Ms. Sheppard, is there a point to all of this? I’ve paid your fee. Your job is done.’
Sometimes, my New England upbringing shines through and I remember how much I hate rich men and their holier-than-thou attitudes. The itch to slap the silver spoon from his mouth ran its way down my arm and into my right hand and I had to cover it with my left to keep from reaching across my desk and smacking my former client across the face.
‘You’re right, it is done. I found your daughter, dead and naked on a riverbed in Baxter State Park. Something about that doesn’t sit right with me, though, and maybe part of it is the fact you don’t seem all that broken up about it.’
Beaumont’s face turned a lovely shade of purple and he sputtered like a dying trout. He whirled on Joe, his eyes livid.
‘Detective, I will not tolerate this!’
Joe shrugged, nonchalant as ever. ‘Mr. Beaumont, you hired Abby Sheppard to do a job and you paid her when she was finished. As far as I’m concerned, she’s no longer on your payroll and therefore no longer your problem.’ He grinned slightly. ‘I divorced her so she wouldn’t be my problem anymore.’
Well that was uncalled for…
I leaned forward in my desk chair and the movement caught Harry’s attention. He turned and looked at me and I caught a glimpse of fear behind his green eyes. They were the same eyes that had stared up at me three days earlier without the defining spark of life all fifteen year olds should have. The anger that was bubbling under the surface of my calm exterior threatened to show and I had to take a deep breath to steady myself.
‘See, Mr. Beaumont, I suspect you were fed up with your daughter’s behavior and refusal to get help for her addiction and the weekend before you reported Zoë missing, the two of you had a fight and you had her committed to a facility in the Berkshires, a fairly well known one.’ I turned to Joe and smiled slightly. ‘It has quite the alumni listing – James Taylor, that writer Wynona Ryder played on the screen a few years back. It’s the place to be if you’re an elite New Englander with a drug addiction or medicated mental illness.’
‘You’ve no proof,’ Harry said and it was the wrong comeback to use.
‘As a matter of fact, she does,’ Joe said. ‘See, before she became a private investigator, she was a psychologist at that uppity facility you checked your daughter into. She made one call, mentioned a name, and came out with the medical records of your daughter.’
If he turned a deeper shade of purple, I was fairly sure he’d end up passed out on the floor with Joe giving him CPR. I could, in all probability, contribute to the compressions if need be, but my certification ran out a month ago and I didn’t want to be held liable for any mistakes I might make.
‘You have no right to those records,’ he said.
‘Again, you’re wrong,’ I said with a small smile. ‘In Massachusetts, patient-client privilege doesn’t extend past death. Anything in her medical records is fair game.’
It was incredible. The words were no sooner out my mouth when Harry Beaumont’s entire demeanor seemed to…deflate. As a trained investigator, I immediately knew I’d struck a nerve.
‘You needed a way to explain your daughter’s absence, so you told everyone she’d run away. A runaway daughter, while not exactly a publicist’s dream situation, was still better than a cocaine-addicted daughter.’
‘Why would I hire you if I knew exactly where my daughter was?’
‘I had a hard time with that one, too, until I talked to my friend at the Berkshires facility. Turns out, Zoë ran away from there, too, and when they told you, you realized you couldn’t call the police for help because you’d already reported her missing. It would look really suspicious if you called again.’
He’d gone from purple to ashen in barely a second.
‘So I got you close enough to find your daughter. She was camping out in the state park and you went there with the intention of bringing her back to the rehab facility. Problem was, Zoë didn’t want to go back. She wanted to come home, but unfortunately for you, Zoë coming home meant headaches for your reputation. You’d just donated millions of dollars to a drug rehabilitation wing at a hospital in Portland. If it came to light that your teenage daughter was a drug addict, it wouldn’t look good for your philanthropist image.’
Joe leaned forward and while I was aware of the fact he was making it easier for him to grab his cuffs or his gun, should he need to, it seemed as though Harry was completely oblivious to it.
‘I didn’t mean to hurt her,’ Beaumont said, his voice low and childlike. Neither Joe nor I said anything and in the silence that ensued, I could hear the sputtering of the coffee pot in the background. It was working overtime to keep the morning pot warm.
‘We were walking and everything was fine, but when I mentioned the Berkshires she lost it. She started screaming at me and throwing punches and I grabbed her. I held my arm around her throat, just to subdue her, to calm her down. I didn’t realize how hard I was holding on until she went limp.’
He started to cry and I suddenly found myself at war between pity and disgust. He’d gone to such great lengths to secure his reputation as a crusader against the evils of drugs and in the end, he’d cared more about his own image than the health and future of his daughter. I almost felt sorry for him, but a bigger part of me still felt like hitting him.
‘The whole time, you counted on the ineptitude of the local police force to keep your secret,’ Joe said, standing and unhooking his cuffs from his belt. ‘Too bad for you, Mr. Beaumont, you happened to hire the most annoyingly suspicious private investigator this side of Portland.’
Which reminded me…
‘Why did you hire me, Mr. Beaumont?’ I asked as Joe pulled Harry to his feet and started to cuff him.
He shrugged. ‘I wanted someone without any experience finding missing children. I asked around and Amos told me you were good at catching cheating husbands. I figured you’d be as inept as the police.’
I looked at Joe, my eyebrows raised. ‘I think I’ve just been insulted.’
*
I grew up in this tiny part of the world and when I left it to spread my wings and experience the rest of the universe, I realized that as great as cities might be, they’re missing something vastly important: space. It took me a few years to get my life together and learn how to be independent from the small town that spat me into the world, but when I was in my early thirties I quit my job in the rehab facility and moved home to help Amos Greene take care of my tiny town. I divorced Joe, bought a house out by the lake, and got myself a dog – a big Black Lab named Bear.
‘Explain to me again why he left his daughter naked and dead on the riverbed?’ my dad asked as he scratched Bear’s ears. He’d come over earlier to cook me dinner and drink my beer and now we were watching the August sun set over the edge of the lake.
‘He wanted it to look random,’ I said. ‘He took her clothes with him but he forgot to pack up the campsite. The park rangers found it while we were interviewing Beaumont this afternoon.’ I took a long pull off my beer and glanced over at my dad. He had a frown on his face that was so deep I could have planted tomatoes in the lines on his forehead. ‘Quit thinking about it, dad.’
‘I just don’t understand people,’ he said.
My dad had been a logger for most of his life and the greatest side effect from hard times spent in the forest – besides the bad back, shot knees, and arthritic hips – was that he didn’t really understand human nature outside his own family. Even then it was a little bit of a struggle for him. He’d gotten better over the years, but every now and again I’d come across something that would boggle his mind completely.
‘Harry Beaumont was a man who cared more about his reputation than he did about his daughter, and while that may be a hard concept for you to understand, he believed wholeheartedly that the benefits of his actions outweighed the cost.’
‘No reason why a man should feel his daughter isn’t important.’
I raised my beer and we clinked bottles. ‘Amen, dad.’
In the five short years I’d been doing this job, I’d seen very little that had the ability to turn my stomach. In fact, I’d seen more depravity amongst the addicts and mentally ill that I’d worked with before than I had with the adulterers and liars I worked with now. But I could honestly say that the image of Zoë Beaumont’s broken body was something that would stay with me longer than I wished it would.
‘Not even a psychology degree can explain some things,’ I said.
My dad shrugged.
‘Just be glad you got paid.’
I took a long sip off my beer and nodded, not trusting myself to speak because the truth was I wasn’t glad I’d gotten paid.
I wasn’t glad at all.
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You have very little descriptions of the people. I know Amos looks like a sausage, but I don’t know what anyone else looks like. Is Joe handsome, ugly, fat, old? And I don’t know what Abby looks likes, all I know is that she’s in her late thirties. I think a little more description of them wouldn’t go amiss.
The case seems rather quick. I know it’s a short story, but you’ve packet it all in, in a small space of time. You only briefy mention them going to the school and making a call to the faciltly. You don’t mention the actual conversations or the teachers that they talk to at the school. I think more detailing before they speak to Beaumont could be useful.
You don’t give the readers a chance to solve the case. I knew it was Beaumont as he was the only suspect, but I didn’t know why. Had you mentioned who she called in Berkshire, or mentioned her degree, the pieces would have been there for the readers to find. But the readers can’t really guess who did it as they don’t know the information the MC knows until after they start interviewing Beaumont. Your holding information back from the readers, preventing them from solving the case.
You have a large beginning and ending that doesn’t fully relate to the case. The beginning is good, I like the beginning, but I feel it could be condensed. Same with the ending. You don’t have to mention exactly when she moved or why. Likewise you don’t have to mention so much about the tourists, as no-one in the piece is a tourist. For a short piece I personally feel you are trying to cram too much information about the setting.
The MC also says ‘Not to self – never work with your ex-husband.’
I think you meant ‘Note to self’
Secondly, the MC says this, yet she seems to get along fine. If she finds it a headache to work with her ex, you need to show this. Does he undermine her? Try to beat her to solving the case? In the piece they seem to get along, therefore the ex comment is confusing as it suggests they don’t get along.
I don’t get why Beaumont confessed. He wasn’t arrested and they had no evidence, so why confess? It might work better if he confesses after they find the tent, or perhaps if they find something that belonged to him at the tent. Or his fingerprints were on the victims neck.
Oh, and I would probably add another suspect. As Beaumont is the only person in the case, it’s obvious it’s him. Perhaps give more information on the driver, does he have a record? And get them to speak to him. Or bring in a boyfriend or a suspicious friend.
You have a good case, good characters and a good setting. I just think if there is more information on the case leading up to Beaumont, it could work better. In my opinion, this piece feels too short even for a short story. It seems like you have a lot to portray and it doesn’t feel like you have used enough words.
Of course, this is all just my opinion.
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