Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 128, Nos. 3 & 4. Whole Nos. 781 & 782, September/October 2006

But there was no such entertainment tonight. Just me, sulking, nursing a Sam Adams beer. Earlier today, after my frustrating conversation with Monty, I had made phone calls to other people I knew in Boston Falls. The town clerk. The three selectmen. Members of the zoning board and planning board. Other members of the town’s historical society. And it was like a computer virus had suddenly spread to all of them, affecting their memories. Not one knew anything about what had been up at Shay’s Meadow. Not one.

So what was going on?

I took a swallow of my brew. Let’s look at the facts. Our mysterious Tuesday caller claims that he’s responsible for killing a number of people. This week, however, he slips in an extra piece of information. That this dreadful event had occurred up on Shay’s Meadow. On Shay’s Meadow are the remains of what look like concrete footings for structures of some kind. But the police chief and about every other breathing individual in this town claims no knowledge of what had been up there.

Yeah, right. Facts.

There were other facts as well, a little voice inside of me said. Right? Right. Like the boxes of books, clothing, and other personal belongings piled up in my spare bedroom. No time to unpack since moving here, or no interest? Monty was right. We’re here to make our mark, make the editors down south forget about the foul-up that exiled us here. We’re not here to serve the people in this town, to learn who they are or what they do. Nope, we’re here to feed off of them, until we can go back to an office with a door and a condo with a swimming pool in the complex.

And while we’re looking at facts, Mr. Drinking-a-Beer-All-Alone, how many of your wonderful friends and acquaintances down south have been up here to meet you since your exile?

Easy answer: none.

Exiled from what you thought was your home, and ending up at a place where you didn’t fit in. I finished my beer and thought some more, as the mother-and-daughter team next-door started yelling about whose turn it was this week to clean the bathroom.

Facts. Didn’t mean I particularly liked any of them.

The next day at my desk, I sent off an e-mail before I did anything else, and then did the usual grunt work of the morning: calling the fire departments and police departments in the local towns as well as the county dispatch center to see if anything interesting had happened overnight. The first few weeks after I arrived in Boston Falls, I insisted on driving around and looking at all of the logs myself, because I couldn’t see trusting any of these people to tell me what was going on. I quickly found out how stupid I had been: The people in these towns are proud of what their departments do, and they want stories about them to appear in the newspaper. Not like other places I’d worked, where it sometimes took a court order and a crowbar to get information.