Two
—Crime Hive podcast
Something about the threatening message didn’t sit right with me. It felt real, somehow. Menacing. Less a threat, and more a promise.
Maybe I was completely off base and it really was just another troll trolling, but I wasn’t going to take any chances. I wasn’t easily rattled, but I also wasn’t stupid.
“This is why you should never mess around with serial killers,” said Oscar, my brother, the town sheriff, as he studied the message on my phone the next morning.
He wore his tan sheriff’s uniform and shiny golden badge, glinting under the kitchen lights at Koi, as he carefully tucked his thumb into his gun belt, near the Glock in its holster. “Their fans are always bananas.”
Oscar was the tallest in the family at five-eleven, and carried an air of seriousness about him that hardly anybody questioned.
“So you think it’s just a fan?” I asked, hopeful.
“A misguided one. Probably. I warned you not to do Crime Hive,” Oscar said in his most annoying older brother I-told-you-so tone, which he used on the regular. Almost anything Oscar ever said made me want to scream, “You’re not the boss of me!” and run to my room and slam the door.
“I’m a grown-ass adult,” I said instead.
“So you keep telling me,” Oscar said, doubt in his tone. “Just like you told me you didn’t need babysitting, even though you were the one who fell through the ice.”
“I was seven,” I protested, not that Oscar—or even the whole town—ever would let me forget. Many around town still called me Thin Ice, all these years later. Not so much because I was the miracle child who survived, but more because I was a magnet for trouble.
“Right.” Oscar seemed unconvinced.
“Crime Hive was the break of a lifetime,” I said, even more so because I’d just graduated Northwestern and lucked into an internship at a podcasting production studio, where I pitched my idea about following this little-known string of murders in Chicagoland that I believed were connected.
The producers jumped on it, and we’d broken the news that the Midwest had a new serial killer on the loose.
“Not so much a break now, is it?” Oscar was the worst when he gloated. I really wish I had a bedroom door to slam.
“Can you actually be helpful for once? What are the chances it’s the killer?
” I couldn’t shake a gut feeling that told me this was a real threat.
I took a sip of the coffee Dad had made.
Dad ran on strong black coffee every morning and wouldn’t let Mom near his coffee machine.
Given how she murdered banana muffins, I didn’t blame him.
“I think it’s probably some jerk who’s targeting you just for fun.
” He took a screenshot of the messages and then texted them to himself before he handed my phone back to me.
“But I can ask one of my old Marine buddies at the FBI what they make of these messages. Don’t do anything foolish, and block that account, okay? ” Oscar warned me.
“So, I shouldn’t text back and tell him I’m a woman not a girl? It is disrespectful.” I glanced at the message again. “Also, it sounds like he might be into BDSM. Should I tell him I’m a dom, not a sub? Maybe he’s the bad boy who needs to be punished.”
“Please never say those words to me again,” Oscar said, deadpan, as he finished his coffee and set the empty mug in Mom’s sink. He grabbed his sheriff’s baseball cap off the counter and set it on his head as I followed him out of the kitchen to Koi’s wraparound porch.
His black SUV, with LAKE SANGUIS SHERIFF emblazoned in gold letters across the doors, was parked near the mailbox in the small semicircular driveway.
I shoved my hands deep into the front pocket of my hoodie, shivering in the October morning chill.
I could smell someone burning wood in the distance, and the gathering clouds above our heads threatened snow.
Or rain. Hard to tell this time of year.
“Don’t go posting your location anywhere—just in case,” Oscar warned me over his shoulder as he hesitated, hand on the door handle.
“I’m not a fool,” I said. “I never post my location, and I scrub all the geotags from my photos.”
“Good,” he said as a clatter in the driveway made us both turn to see that Dad, wearing a vintage Van Halen tee, had dropped his wrench.
He bent down to pick it up, met my eye, and then gave me a playful wink.
Dad rarely said much, probably because Mom never let him get a word in edgewise.
He returned to his work inside the hood of his vintage Mustang, a car he’d been working on restoring since I was a little kid.
“Does he need help?” I asked Oscar, who put his thumbs in his belt loops.
“Best to leave him be when he’s wrestling with the Beast,” Oscar said. That was our family’s nickname for his cherry-red convertible 1977 Mustang Cobra that currently had only two wheels and no working engine.
Dad’s small portable speaker sitting beside the right front tire began blaring Whitesnake, and we both laughed a little.
He loved hairbands from the eighties, Wisconsin’s enduring and favorite decade.
It’s why he’d named the fish in Mom’s koi pond after his idols: Bon Jovi, Whitesnake, Van Halen, Joan Jett, and David Lee Roth, aka Diamond Dave.
“Now that Dad’s busy working on his car, Mom’s got free time, and that’s bad news,” I said. “She’s trying to get me off the Spark app. Tells me she can find me dates.”
Oscar studied me. “If she tries to set you up with any of my friends, don’t let her. Especially not Jude.” He crossed his arms across his uniform.
“Ew, I’d never think of dating Jude.” I wasn’t eleven anymore. Then I hesitated. “Also, why can’t I date Jude?”
“He just got out of a long-term relationship.”
“With Kenzie Gordon?”
Oscar glanced at me sharply. “So you heard.”
“Mom told me.”
“Well, he’s vulnerable right now.” Oscar seemed unusually protective of Jude. But then again, Oscar was always territorial. He had a rule that neither Olivia nor I could even set foot in his room when we were little. Probably because I had a habit of stealing his Swiss Army pocketknife.
“I thought he did the breaking up.”
“He did, but still. Stay away from him.” Oscar planted both hands on his hips, in his typical lecture-stance. “Unlike you, Jude doesn’t do casual.”
“Did I fall into a Jane Austen novel all of a sudden? Are we playing Bridgerton? Do you, as the elder brother, get to pick my suitors now? Ooh, what’s my dowry? I’m dying to know.”
“Funny. Real funny.” Oscar turned and grabbed the door handle of his SUV and swung it open. He climbed into the driver’s seat, signaling the end of the conversation.
“Hey, Sheriff!” called Tammy Anderson, interrupting his exit as she scurried up our driveway. Tammy was our neighbor and the town’s busiest busybody, who jumped at any chance to collect gossip from the block.
She wore her signature bright orange puffer vest, and her dyed platinum-blond hair was styled in a 1980s Farrah Fawcett feathered do, the most popular haircut of Tammy’s middle school years. Say what you want about Tammy, but she’d never get lost in a blizzard.
“Hey, Tammy,” Oscar said, managing not to sound annoyed. It was amazing how he did that for everyone in town but me. He kept the SUV door open, booted foot resting against the interior panel.
“And, oh, hi dere, Thin Ice!” Tammy said, glancing at me brightly.
I cringed at the nickname. Oscar kept an immaculate poker face, though I could see the hint of a smug smile at the corner of his mouth.
“Oh, no, yeah, I heard you were back in town? So glad I caught you. I got your mail again, oh, you betcha!” She spoke in the high nasal-forward accent so prevalent throughout the Midwest, as she offered two thin postcards.
“Really?” I took them, noting the top one was a patio furniture advertisement addressed to “Resident” and the other was a public service announcement from the city reminding everyone to keep lids on their trash cans to deter the ever-bolder raccoons.
Neither of these merited hand delivery, and any other neighbor would’ve probably just pitched them without noting the single-digit difference in the address.
Tammy was just poking around for gossip. Some things never changed. Like Tammy’s brown lipstick, one of the few nineties trends not coming back.
Tammy eyed my tight spandex leggings and cropped white top with distaste. “Wearing white after Labor Day?” she tsked. “And those leggings are a little tight, dontcha think?”
“They’re comfortable.”
“Comfortable? Is that what we’re calling it these days?” she said, shade in her voice. “Oh! I almost forgot, your mom and I were talking about you at knitting club last night.”
Oh, Lord. The knitting club. Might as well call it the Busybodies Matchmaking Club. If your name came up at knitting club, there was an awkward date with somebody’s sweaty, acne-prone nephew in your future.
“Your mom, she goes, ‘Thin Ice is on the Spark app’ and I go, ‘Oh, no, isn’t that dangerous?’ and she goes, ‘Oh, yeah, dangerous for sure, ’cause you saw that Dateline,’ and I go, ‘Of course! Everyone saw that Dateline! That’s how women get murdered!
’ And she goes, ‘And I don’t think that’s the app where you find husband material’ and I said, ‘No, yeah, it’s not at all, ’cause I heard it’s a site for”—she dropped her voice low—“easy women with a certain reputation.’ ”
Tammy paused and blinked at me, as if I was going to defend myself.
“Spark is fun,” I said evenly. Oscar looked like he desperately wanted to leave but wasn’t sure how.
“Yes, but you’re not going to find your husband on there. I found my Ted back when we were both in the Air Force.”
I also forgot until right at that moment that Tammy had served in the military for several years after high school. That was well before women were allowed combat roles, so I’m pretty sure she just answered phones and filed paperwork.
“Ah, I remember those days!” Tammy sighed, nostalgic. “Ted always looked so handsome in his uniform. That was before law school, you know.”