No More Misty Mornings

By Stephanie Keller

Reporter Dies in Car Fire. Not much of a headline for a talented feature writer. No mention of the bullet in his forehead. No mention of the people whose lives he touched. And no mention of the woman who loved him and is determined to find out why he died. Wrong place, wrong time? A robbery gone bad? Suicide? Or was it something more sinister? Did he discover something that brought down the wrath of Seattle's most influential elite. Cara is going to find out--if she isn't killed first!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Stephanie Keller
• Release date: Feb 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310362859

Stephanie Keller

Love a good mystery about ordinary people? So do I! Especially a serious story I can believe in, with a laugh or two along the way.I hope you’ll enjoy my first mysteries. Past President is the first in a series of cozy mysteries called The Dog Park Mysteries set in Boise, Idaho, where I live with my husband. It’s twisty and sometimes scary, but the characters are people you might know. Is one of your friends a killer?No More Misty Mornings is set in Seattle, where I lived for many years. I love the weather there, but it can take the grief of losing someone to a new level. I promise you, no super heroes or super villains, no torture or high speed chases. Only a senseless murder and the determination to track down the killer.The daughter of an Air Force officer, I’ve lived in dozens of diverse places, from Florida to Washington state and dozens of places in between. I’ve never lost the love of new horizons. My “real” jobs have also been diverse, including teaching junior high, processing insurance claims, delivering and sorting the US mail, and working in the offices of a well-known cable television company, a large university and a major nonprofit hospital. I also owned and operated a bakery and worked at numerous temporary jobs from inventory to packaging spices, locating auto parts and plating surgical scalpels.I am a graduate of the University of Denver, but life is its own education, and so is reading! My love of books began early. I had my own library card before I was three years old. So many authors have inspired me that it’s not hard to understand why my writing is varied, too.In reading, as in life, my motto is, “Have fun. It’s required.”Although these are my first adult books, I have written several chapter books for children as Carolyn Gold. My first published book was a middle grade fantasy, Dragonfly Secret, which was nominated for the Sunshine State Young Readers Award. More recently, I’ve turned to e-books, with Ghosts Don’t Do Homework, Summer Camp Blues, and Mr. Ogilvie Told Me So, also chapter books for younger readers.

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CHAPTER ONE

If Terry had picked another day to die, the flames of his burning car would have been plastered across the front page of the morning paper above headlines that shouted REPORTER MURDERED in 48 point bold. Or maybe I felt that way because Terry Hansen was—had been— so much a part of my life. It was hard to be objective.

I carried the paper out onto the cedar deck and stood for a minute staring out across Puget Sound, sipping at a cup of bitter coffee, trying to still the whirling abyss of my mind. The smudgy dawn helped somehow. The throaty, mournful honk of a ferry, out of sight around the point, seemed a part of the saltwater beach and seaweed aroma that made up the foggy Seattle air.

I've always loved the gray, pregnant Seattle sky. It's part of what made me stay here after college, instead of going back to Denver. What others considered gloomy always seemed full of promise to me, Nature's way of wrapping rain as a gift instead of thrusting it on us without warning, gentle and nurturing, without the fanfare of thunder and lightning and thrashing winds. Today was no different. The entire sky was awash with soft grays, massed darker and lighter, practicing to be clouds. But today was different.

Terry's death should have been page one news, but it had been relegated to a paragraph on page three of the local section, displaced by a presidential smirk and a grim-faced assortment of frustrated activists held at bay by efficient cordons of secret service men. I've never carried a sign myself, although I believe in a lot of causes. Getting splashed across the front page should make people think, but it doesn't. The folks calling the shots seem to regard protestors on the front page the same way I do the comics: Amusing. Not to be taken seriously. The people who really accomplish change usually work quietly, behind the scenes, and don't much care when someone else takes the credit. Terry was—had been—like that. Making the world around him a little better wherever he could.

I knew my mind was throwing up fragments of ideas and memories to keep from dealing with the unthinkable present, but I couldn't stop it. I turned back to the paper.

Even the early moves of the next election took priority in the news. The Attorney General had managed to meet with the President, and made the front page. Maybe he had political aspirations, or maybe it was the simple satisfaction of getting his face in front of the public. Anyone whose employment can be terminated by the whims of the ballot box must have a second sense for public image.

I folded the activists and the President and the AG into a shared darkness they'd have found uncomfortably close. When I flattened the paper across the wooden railing of the deck, fat drops of dew darkened the pages without changing the words. I reread the item about Terry. There wasn't much. Local Reporter Found Dead. He'd been shot. The car burned. The police were investigating. It must have been a late-breaking story; the Seattle Post Intelligencer, better known as the PI, usually did better.

Terry had worked at the weekly Lake City Legend for almost five years. I wondered what more they'd have to say about who he had been, and whether they'd release more details about how he died. Terry—the big, gentle, golden-haired big brother I'd expected to be around forever. His wry sense of humor, the quizzical tilt of his head when he wanted you to think again about something you'd said that didn't quite ring true, the man who wrote about homeless dogs and homeless people with the same compassion. All ended by a muffled shot in the fog.

The splash of hot coffee on my bare foot jerked me back to the present. I overcorrected and spilled some more. I'd forgotten I was holding the mug when I picked up the paper. I set the mug down carefully on the railing. It had been a gift from Terry. It carried a cartoon caricature of a decrepit hag, and the words, Good morning, beautiful.

Why hadn't someone called me? No one was closer to Terry than I was, except maybe his sister—his real sister—Marie, a thousand miles away in Dallas. Although I thought of him as my big brother, Terry and I were actually not related. He and Marie seemed to communicate by telepathy, but didn't talk often. If they were like twins, we were in some ways closer. In the winter, Terry would call me at the University, where I work in the Political Science Department. He'd pretend to be an irate parent or a student wanting to know why we didn't offer a class in something obscurely ridiculous, like The Influence of Pre-Mayan Sculpture on Political Activism in the Southern Baptist Culture. In the summer, when I worked as a clerk at a gun shop, he’d ask about parts for a blunderbuss or whether laundry soap mixed with the black powder would keep a flintlock’s barrel clean.

He knew how to make me laugh. I think that was what brought us together in the first place. Terry always got a kick out of life. We'd been together for years—three years since college and one before we graduated, but he still made me laugh, and he still called every night, even when he was working on a story or out with friends, so I wouldn't worry. He hadn't called last night. This morning, I'd checked his room to see if I just hadn't heard him come in, but he wasn't there. I'd closed the door again before I read the paper.

I found I'd been holding my breath. I let it out, loss turning to mist and fading. The police wouldn't have known to notify me. Terry listed his studio in Queen Anne as home on his driver's license.

As for the editor of the Legend, I felt a little less forgiving. No, a lot less forgiving. Why hadn't Foster called me? Others might not know Terry's private life, but Foster certainly did. We'd been at his house more than a few times, had dinner with him and his wife and two teen children, even spent a weekend in the San Juans once on a sort of working vacation where Terry and Foster had spent most of the time talking about a project while Foster's wife and I gathered scraps of driftwood on the beach. Foster must have thought I'd heard about Terry from the police. Even so, he might have called.

My jaw had clenched so tightly that my chin felt stiff, and I forced myself to relax. Time enough for anger when I went to clear out Terry's desk and rescue whatever personal items he'd left behind. I was too numb yet to cry. Maybe now would be a good time to go to the newspaper office, while my mind still insisted the whole thing was a big mistake.

CHAPTER TWO

I didn't have to worry about taking time off work. I had stayed on at the University after I graduated, on a regular ten month contract, which meant I worked the school year, with summers off, pretty much the way faculty did. I liked it. It paid well enough that I didn't have to have a job the two free months, but I could if I wanted to. I usually did. In the summers, I worked for Freeman’s Arms, a gun shop in Burien that belonged to an old friend of my dad. It was a good arrangement, as I knew the business well and could cover while other employees took a week or two of vacation. With school out, I wasn’t due to start there for another week.

It wasn't raining when I pulled out of the carport, but the fog hung heavy and oppressive in the air. Teardrops of moisture quickly began to form and trickle down the windshield. I turned the wipers on to hold them at bay, and drove like a zombie across the huge slanted arch of the West Seattle bridge into the city. I didn't notice whether the Space Needle was still there, drawing tourists like a magnet, or whether the ferries were scurrying back and forth across the Sound like worried beetles. Of course they were. And Terry was off somewhere, working on a story. Nothing else made any sense.

I headed north on the I5 corridor as it twisted between towering buildings, like a flood swollen river rushing through old growth forest, the stream of cars and trucks and split-bodied buses swept along with the torrent, dangerous and uncontrollable. Past the city proper, past Lake Union with its fishing boats and yachts and boatyards, I left the freeway and headed into Lake City, a suburb that might as well be part of Seattle. Hard to know where one ended and the other began.

The Legend offices are a nondescript two-story cinderblock building that used to be a record store. One side wall is a mural of an old-time paperboy on the streets of a city that looks more like vintage New York or Chicago than Seattle. The front is a depressing creamy brown with green trim, like a moldy graham cracker. The parking lot in back is big and empty, with tangles of wild blackberry vines threatening the edges like jungle creeping down the shore to a sea of muddy gravel. I parked up against the back of the building and went in through the back door, up one floor to where the editor had his office.

Seeing Foster hunched over his massive desk helped me maintain the illusion that everything was normal. I rapped on the chicken-wired glass that encased his little corner office. He glanced up and waved me in without changing expression. His appearance was slovenly, as usual. A middle-sized man, he'd played baseball in college, but thirty years had left him saggy. He wore a dirty, rumpled sport shirt in blue and yellow plaid. His hair had gone to gray, and looked a week overdue for a trim. He bit his nails instead of smoking, and sometimes I thought an overflowing ashtray might have been a better choice. Foster didn't look like the editor of a successful weekly newspaper, and if he hadn't put up the money to start it himself, he probably wouldn't have been. It was hard to believe the slender, dark-eyed teens in the silver-framed photograph that swam amid the piles of papers on his desk were his kids, Christopher and Danielle.

He greeted me with a casual nod, as if he'd been waiting for me to come in. He told me to go ahead and clear Terry's desk and locker.

Why don't you write his obituary for us, Cara?

I stared incredulously at him. "You want me to write his obituary?"

He waved the clipping from the PI at me, but I didn't reach out to take it. I'd already read it enough times to commit it to memory. I knew the sight of the words there in black and white would bring tears to my eyes again. Terry murdered. Jesus.

I took a deep breath to stop the shudders and shook my head. Let someone else do it.

Foster shook his head. Who? Wilson, maybe?

I bit back an obscenity. No, not Wilson.

Wilson was the bone-headed son-of-a-bitch who'd taken a swing at Terry for putting a gay rights bumper sticker on an official press car. Terry had ducked and laughed. Everyone's entitled to his own opinion. Terry hadn't minded. I had. The next day I'd hidden Terry's car keys so he had to drive my Explorer, with the NRA sticker my Dad had stuck on the back window to discourage muggers. I don't think Wilson picked up on who was driving it. If he had, Terry hadn't mentioned it.

No, not Wilson, I said again. Why do you keep that red-necked bastard, anyway?

Foster leaned back, his massive frame balanced precariously on two spindly wooden chair legs, one worn Nike braced against the desk. He's good at local sports.

Probably works cheap, too.

He let the chair legs drop back to the floor. Shit, Cara, who else would know what to say about Terry? Or what he'd want it to say? Get it to me by tomorrow afternoon.

He handed me the clipping and a printout of some details someone had dug up for him, as if I didn't know more about Terry than they ever would. He hunched back over the desk, dismissing me as if I were one of the paper's stringers instead of the de facto next of kin, come to pick up the things Terry had left behind. I stood there a minute, shrugged and turned toward the door.

Cara. I stopped with my hand on the door handle. No details. About how he died.

"He didn't die. He was murdered."

Foster sighed. Yeah, well, just go easy on that, okay? Let the police deal with it.

I pushed out into the hall without answering. Foster had a point. Someone had to write an obituary. Terry had been working freelance on the paper off and on for five years, since he had been a junior at the University of Washington, so from the paper's point of view it wouldn't be enough to print the facts of his death. He was family here. I crumpled the clipping and glanced at the printout.

TERRANCE J. HANSEN

Age 26

Born Dallas, Texas

UW alumni

Survived by sister, Marie Hunt, Dallas, Texas

Parents deceased

Not much of a list for someone who had worked here for four years. Was that all they knew about him, I wondered. Or all they cared?

Found in Ballard locks parking area

Shot in head

Gas can found nearby. Plastic lighter in car.

No suspects

I crumpled the list, too, and stuffed it in my coat pocket.

In fairness, while Terry was instantly likeable, he wasn't—hadn't been—a very open person. Being a reporter who was forever prying into other people's lives, he had valued his own privacy more than most. He was warm and charming, and you felt like old friends minutes after you met him, but if you really stopped to think about the conversation, you'd find he hadn't told you anything very specific. Not nearly as much as you'd told him.

I had picked up on that when I first met him. We had been out with other students from the dorms, not exactly a date, drinking beer and eating pizza, getting to know each other. I noticed that none of the answers from Terry went very deep, even when we had ordered a third round of pitchers. Just as I figured it out, he caught my eye and grinned. After that, it was a game between us. In the end, we knew each other in ways that ordinarily don't happen, because we really paid attention to every detail. We intentionally withheld information, without lying about anything, challenging each other's perceptions. It had been almost a year before Terry found out I had a brother, and another two months before he mentioned his sister.

I think he was the only one who really understood when I took a job as a secretary at the gun store. My brother was happy, because he saw it as his kid sister trying to be more like him. My father thought I was giving in, giving up my rebellion against him, and that the only reason I'd been able to get any job at all was because of the good word he'd put in for me. Terry sensed the truth, that I hadn't really thought about the nature of the business as having anything to do with my job. I was handling correspondence and payroll and billing. If the company had been selling violins or crystal vases or baby food it wouldn't have mattered. To me, and to Terry, it hadn't been much different than the job I held at the University.

After a while, we drifted into sharing an old four bedroom house near campus with a couple of friends. Later, when I'd found my beach house on the West Seattle bluff overlooking Puget Sound, Terry and I had continued the arrangement.

He'd been at the Legend for five years, but he only worked here. I couldn't blame anyone at the Legend for not really knowing him. But I knew he could have reeled off lists of their favorite colors and their kids' birthdays if they had asked.

I made my way across the workroom. It was half the ground floor of the converted cinderblock storefront, without partitions, a human holding pen jammed with desks and chairs. Fluorescent tube lights in the high ceiling produced a cold, inorganic radiance that I had always thought was depressing. Even houseplants refuse to thrive under lights like that. Half a dozen people were busy working on stories, reviewing files or hanging out waiting for something to happen. They noticed me and looked away, almost as if they were all responding to some cue from an off-stage director.

All except Wilson.

I don't approve of stereotypes, but like home remedies, they usually have a basis in fact. The stereotype redneck seemed to have been created to describe Wilson. A little below average height, scrawny and muscular like a Popeye caricature, he worked out to keep the awkward bulges of muscle on his bony frame. They seemed disconnected, a lump here and a bump there, like a piece of bad sculpture. His work shirts and blue jeans, a macho, honest laborer style, clashed with his personality like rap music in a cathedral. Just seeing him for the first time across a room, you half-expected him to drawl, Aw, shucks, and spit on the floor, but underneath he was shifty and mean spirited.

He was standing near the door, talking to someone in the hallway beyond. His mouth twisted in a half sneer and he started toward me. One of the regulars stopped him with a hand on his arm. He looked in my direction again, shrugged and went out into the hall.

Baiting bullies like Wilson had been a weakness in Terry. He couldn't seem to help ruffling their feathers and watching them act like imbeciles. One day Wilson had intercepted me in the parking lot where I had been waiting for Terry and started explaining the fundamentalist facts to me, self-righteously warning me what sort of tinkerbelle my friend was. I had laughed in his face, and he'd never really forgiven me.

I was glad someone had warned him off today. I was in no mood for anything he might have said. I wasn't sure whether I'd burst into tears or tear into him with my bare hands, and I didn't want to find out. I pretended I hadn't noticed him and made my way over to the battered wooden desk in the corner where Terry had worked when he came into the office. He mostly brought pieces in on computer disks and let Foster and his crew do any editing they wanted, but there were times he needed to be closer to the newspapers resources.

The in and out baskets stacked on one corner of the desk were empty, the old computer terminal silent and shrouded. I ran my finger across the initials MLN gouged in the wooden surface of the desk and wondered idly whether the rumor was true that Foster had furnished the whole newspaper office from a school surplus auction. Terry had thought the story was amusing, something Foster had made up to support his frugal, make-do image. I sighed. Funny how your mind picks up on the silliest details to keep from facing things that hurt. On one level I'd accepted the fact that Terry was dead, but on the everyday, operational level he was going to be a constant presence for a long time to come.

Terry was murdered, I told myself deliberately. Shot in the head in the middle of a rainy night. He's not going to be there for orange juice and scrambled eggs tomorrow morning, and you only have to pick up one steak to grill next Sunday. That made it seem even more absurd. Terry couldn't be dead.

I sat down in his chair and set my scruffy briefcase on the floor. There was a yellow legal pad on the desk. I pulled it closer and sat staring at it, rubbing a chewed old wooden pencil between my fingers and trying to figure out where to start. Dearly beloved kept popping into my head. Stupid. But where do you start an obituary?

I put the pencil to paper, but after I wrote Terry's name, nothing came but doodles, pointless circles that led nowhere. I had always envied Terry's talent as a writer. He managed to make the people he interviewed seem real to his readers. What could I say about him that would do that? That he bowled twice a week and liked to sit around the kitchen table until two o'clock in the morning eating cold boiled shrimp and arguing about the social impact of grafitti or whether the Iraqis should get American aid? That he could play the theme from Deliverance on the harmonica, and laughed a lot? I put the pencil down, balled up the sheet of paper and threw it in the trash. I was getting nowhere. Let someone else write the damned obituary.

I stood up, nearly colliding with a man who'd come up behind me, He reached into the waste basket to pull out the balled up sheet of paper I'd tossed, then straightened lazily, two hundred pounds of sheer muscle buried in another thirty pounds of fat. He was probably six one and it was a lot like coming face to face with a winter-ready mother bear, waddling toward hibernation. A shaggy brown tweed coat, still dripping from Seattle's perpetual drizzle, only added to the effect. The mingled scents of cigar smoke and wet wool made my nose twitch. I had an impression of strength, but the line of his jaw was pudgy and weak. A bully, I thought, not pinning the feeling down to specifics.

What do you think you're doing? I demanded.

I could ask you the same thing. You don't work here, do you?

No. I could have told him the truth, that I was here in the capacity of family, to pick up personal items from Terry's desk. Or I could have said that I was from the FBI, investigating Terry Hansen's involvement in an international drug cartel. I felt more like telling him to go to hell. I compromised by saying nothing.

He spread the paper out on the desk, carefully smoothing it with a massive hand until the words took form again, and looked up. His eyes were the color of muddy water. He spent a minute appraising me. I'm five four, a hundred and fifteen pounds, short blonde hair. I look young enough that people double check the birthdate on my ID card. I wondered if I looked different today, as old as I felt, aged onto the downhill slope by losing Terry.

You're writing Hansen's obituary? His voice was flat, like wet rags dropped on a concrete floor.

I bit back an obscene brush off. What business is it of yours?

He reached one hand deep in the dark recesses of the coat and brought out a stained wallet. He flipped it open and closed again so quickly I got