Three-Eyed Alien Abducts Dog Groomer: Aretha Moon Mysteries, #1

By Linda Ross

Aretha Moon is overweight, middle-aged, divorced and cranky.  And things don't improve when her sister's gallery assistant is killed.  Aretha's boss at The Spyglass, a Hannibal, Missouri, tabloid, assigns her the story, and the complications pile on.  Aretha uncovers a tangled web of deceit and sadistic pranks perpetrated years ago by a high school clique of mean girls.  And now those girls are dying one by one.  As her story heats up, the killer's attention turns to Aretha.  Her only help is the handsome detective who was her childhood crush and an elderly poodle with a weak bladder.  Can she survive to binge another day on cheesecake and Diet Coke?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Linda Ross
• Release date: Jul 6, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201649135

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

If anyone was going to be murdered, I would have put my money on Casper Donovon. The man was infuriating—rude, bellicose, and quick to take offense.  And it was my unfortunate assignment to interview him about the alien abduction of his wife.  I had tried mightily to get out of the task, because I’d answered Casper’s phone call and knew what a pain he was going to be.

Can’t Carl do it? I’d whined.  I’ll stay late and do the dancing rat story.  This was a real sacrifice on my part, because I hate rats no matter how talented they are.

Carl’s doing the miracle cure for incontinence.  And this Donovon guy is in your neck of the woods.  You can leave early and catch him on the way home.  You’ll have fun. Lorenzo chuckled, a laugh that sounds like a Mack truck on an uphill grade.

That was my boss’s idea of a joke.  He knows I’m tired of the alien abduction stories. But they’re bread and butter to Lorenzo Mayo, my boss and the editor of The Spyglass, a weekly tabloid that serves the Midwest.  And I use the word serves loosely.  Our offices are in downtown Hannibal, Missouri, a river town that calls itself America’s Hometown.

What kind of a name is Lorenzo Mayo anyway?  I figure he has to be in the witness protection program.  Nobody has a condiment as a last name, Colonel Mustard of Clue notwithstanding.  And Lorenzo looks like he’s wearing a disguise.  His eyebrows are black and three sizes too big, like his face lost weight and forgot to tell his hair.  He’s around sixty, but his hair is jet black and copious.  Not only does he have five o’clock shadow, but he has five o’clock head.  He must get his hair cut every day.  He comes to work in the morning looking halfway normal, and by afternoon his hair is invading his forehead and his sideburns look like weedy medians on the freeway.  I don’t know.  Maybe he’s a werewolf.

I stepped out of The Spyglass’s nondescript brick building in downtown Hannibal,  and into that particular hell known as summer along the Mississippi River.  The only comparable torture is winter along the Mississippi River.  The wind is a constant harassment.  It smacks you in the face, it pulls at your clothes, and it shoves you.  Some day I’m going to contact a lawyer about getting a restraining order against it.  In the meantime, I hustled, a moving target for the swarms of gnats that dive-bombed my face. 

The inside of my PT Cruiser was sweltering, the steering wheel was too hot to touch, and the AC was feeble in the face of the relentless sun. The breeze from the vent rippled the papers on the passenger seat, an assignment I was planning on finishing up at home.  Lorenzo had appointed me the resident astrologer when the current astrologer quit in a panic, telling Lorenzo that the stars predicted that she was going to be attacked at work by a German.  She started doing astrology readings at home, and a week later a Volkswagen crashed through her living room wall.  She wasn’t injured, but apparently the stains never came out of her couch.

So it fell to me to take over.  When I protested that I knew nothing about astrology, Lorenzo instructed me to just give them something entertaining.  And so I do.  Libra, you’re going to try a new restaurant this week.  Sagittarius, you’ll have a narrow escape when a friend invites you to a sporting event where a brawl ensues.  But, Aquarius—oh, Aquarius!—I save the worst for you.  That’s because my ex-husband is an Aquarius.  This week, Aquarius, you’ll be hounded by disease-bearing mosquitoes and relentless telemarketers.  Your shorts will shrink in the dryer, and beer will give you explosive diarrhea.  You’d think I’d get complaints with astrological forecasts like that, but people seem to enjoy them.  Once, I even received a letter thanking me for my warning about the woman with the glass eye.  I’d kind of like to know what happened there.

I headed south out of Hannibal and turned west before I left the city limits.  I found Casper Donovan’s bungalow on a narrow, crumbling avenue where the street sign, Marigold, hung at an abject angle, embarrassed by its own cheerfulness.  There were two small signs on a post.  The top one read Pooch-A-Rama, and the bottom one read The Kindest Cut.  Not only had the bungalow seen better days, but so had Casper, if that’s who was standing in the yard when I pulled in.

He looked to be about thirty, if thirty was the new fifty.  His jeans and T-shirt were ill-fitting and worn, like hand-me-downs from a thrifty grandfather.  His hair was blond and thinning, apparently retreating from his perpetual scowl.

You’re not the reporter, he announced when I got out of my car.

What makes you say that?

Well, you don’t look like a reporter.  You’re. . . old.  And fat.

I’m not fat, I said, my own irritation rising.  I wear the same size I did when I. . . I paused, searching for an appropriate era.  Got divorced, I finished lamely.  And the forties aren’t old.  That was a bit of a stretch as I had recently turned fifty. 

And don’t you ever get outside?  You look like a mime.  I have to say it’s not a good look with that orange hair.

I’m a redhead! I snapped.  And the sun is not my friend.

What’s your name anyway?

Oh, Lord.  I couldn’t wait to hear his comments on that.  Aretha Moon.  And before you say anything, my mother was a big rhythm and blues fan.  Now, can we get on with the interview, Casper?  What are you, anyway?  A professional critic?

I’m a hairdresser. 

Really?

You know, I could give you a decent haircut.

Tempting as that is, I need to get your story.  I pulled out my phone and started recording.  Okay, what happened?  You said your wife was abducted.

He seemed about to make another comment about my appearance, then changed his mind.

Doris—that’s my wife—we were sleeping two nights ago, and I woke up when lights came in the bedroom window.  There were really bright.  And I could hear some kind of weird sound, like bells or something.  And Doris wasn’t there.

Did you look outside at the lights?

Well, sure.  I got up and went outside, but all I could see were those bright lights and three big red eyes.

What did the eyes look like?

Well, like a giant hamster if it had three red eyes.  The eyes were above the white lights, like it was standing there.

Then what happened?

Then it left.

Where did it go?  Up in the air?

Casper toed the ground and stared down.  I’m not sure.

Why not?

I think they stunned me or something.  You know how aliens have those special lights that make a person forget.

That’s a movie, Casper.  Why can’t you remember?

It might be because I’d been smoking.  His voice trailed off.

Weed?  You were smoking weed?

It helps me sleep, he said defensively.  I’ve got sore feet from standing up doing hair all day, and I need help sleeping.

I sighed.  Well, I could make a story out of this.  Lorenzo’s motto was Embellish, embellish, embellish.

You’ll find Doris for me, won’t you? he pleaded.  I’ve got to groom all the dogs now too, and my feet are really killing me.

Doris was a dog groomer?  I nodded toward the sign.  Despite his prickly comments earlier I felt sorry for him.  Sure, Casper.  We’ll find her.  Now move over into the sun and let me get your photo.

I got several photos, then asked him some more questions about Doris and how long they’d been married.

I went on home and wrote up the story, e-mailing it and the photo to the office.  I finished up the horoscope before I went to bed and got that e-mailed off as well.  The next four days were Tom Sawyer Days in Hannibal, an annual celebration around the Fourth of July, and my assignment from Lorenzo was to find some heart-warming story for the paper.  I went to bed, thinking that I might do a story about the new Becky Thatcher or the frog jumping contest, but what I ended up getting the next day was not exactly heart-warming.

I WAS STANDING ON THE sidewalk with a gaggle of Becky Thatchers when I heard the first ominous thud.  It was all but drowned out by the crowd noise and the calliope music drifting up from the river, but it made me look around to see what had fallen.  I listened intently but couldn’t hear anything amiss.  I was dismissing it as someone slamming a car door when I heard the second thud.  My sister Eileen was standing beside me, hugging her arms to herself in dread of the advancing thunderstorm.  The sky was an ugly shade of purple-black, like a bad bruise.  Eileen and I looked at each other.

Idly I wondered if maybe the wind had blown open the back door of Eileen’s art gallery, but the noise had sounded like something heavier.  And then that second thud had been the unmistakable sound of breakage.  I headed for the gallery with visions of broken artwork making my heart pound.  I tried to turn the knob on the front door and got a big surprise when I realized that the door was locked.  I was getting really worried now, because I knew we hadn’t locked it.  I had spent all morning inside with Eileen and the committee for the evening’s auction.  The chairperson, Patricia Korbut, paranoid about the sanctity of the concrete frogs we were selling, had covered the gallery windows with brown paper so no one could see inside.  The frogs were no big secret.  This was Hannibal, Missouri, after all, home of Mark Twain, author of a famous frog story.  We were celebrating Tom Sawyer Days, and the town was filled with tourists, media people, and locals.  While we were arranging the frogs someone had seen a crew from CBS filming on the street outside, and we had all dashed out to gawk.

Eileen’s assistant, Kathy Dennison, had stayed inside on a ladder, changing the track lighting at Patricia’s insistence to better showcase the frogs.  Patricia was militant when it came to details.  Even Hercules couldn’t have pleased her.  She would have called Merry Maids to redo the Augean Stables.

I tapped on the door and called Kathy’s name but got no response.

What’s going on? Eileen asked as she sidled up to me.  She was shivering now. A few big fat raindrops had begun to fall with an earnestness that meant a heavy rain was only seconds away.  The temperature was in the eighties, the air was as thick and hot as steamed pudding.  Around us, Main Street storekeepers hustled outside to take in their American flags.

I’m not sure.

Come on, Eileen, someone called from the group on the sidewalk.  Open up. It’s starting to rain.

We have to go around back, I called.  The front door’s locked.  I was hoping that everyone would wait for us out front, but with the raindrops increasing in intensity the entire crowd trotted after us as we headed for the alley in back.  There are two stores between Eileen’s gallery and the corner, and we rounded the corner en masse, like a herd of wildebeests with National Geographic on our collective tail.

I could hear murmurs from the group when we passed the two cars parked in back.  That morning someone had spray-painted PIG on Kathy’s Ford Tempo.  She was upset when she found it, and she said something about people not leaving her alone.  I chalked it up to juvenile vandalism at the time, but now I had an unsettling sense that it had been a sign of worse things to come.

The back door was unlocked, and I heaved it open.  The first thing I noticed was how dark it was inside.  The lights were out.  With Patricia’s brown paper covering the windows and the black sky outside, the gallery had the eerie feel of a fun house.  I flipped the switch by the door, and as I looked around the back room I saw a folding chair resting under the doorknob of the rest room.  I could hear someone in there fumbling around and muttering incoherently.

Several of us reached for the chair at the same time, but I pulled it away first and knocked on the door.

Anyone in there?

The door opened slowly to reveal Crane Korbut standing with another folding chair held in front of him.  Crane, one of the committee members, is as anorectic as his mother Patricia.  Both of them remind me of asparagus stalks with their puffy layered hair and the slightly green cast to their complexions.

Stupid door, Crane muttered hastily when he saw us.  It wouldn’t open.

Why was the front door locked? I asked, heading for the gallery.

How should I know? Crane and his mother have the same irritating demeanor.

Thunder cracked overhead as I hurried through the arch to the main room, and rain began lashing the windows.

When I flipped on the gallery lights I saw the woman on the floor and froze.  The crowd still dogging my heels pulled up short and gasped.

The crumpled figure, one of the Becky Thatchers, lay face down.  Her bonnet was spotted with blood and pieces of concrete, as was the floor around her.  I was pretty sure that she was dead.

I was also pretty sure she was Kathy, though I couldn’t see her face.  Since she had been on the ladder when I left the building I was almost certain that that particular Becky Thatcher was Eileen’s assistant lying in the rubble of a broken concrete frog.

It was Patricia who broke the stunned silence. 

She broke the frogs!  What are we going to do now? 

Everyone turned to stare at Patricia, all of us too stunned to react to her failure to grasp the situation.

All right, I said, pulling myself together.  Everybody stay put.  I’ll call 911. Committee members, you watch the doors and don’t let anyone in except emergency personnel.  I glanced at my sister, who was looking decidedly pale.  Go sit down, I told her. 

I refrained from telling the emergency operator that Kathy was dead.  I just said there had been an accident and we needed an ambulance and also the police for crowd control.  What was beginning to register on me now that the first wave of shock had passed was that this didn’t look like an accident.  The ladder was lying on the floor, angled away from the pieces of concrete frog.  All of the frogs had been sitting on the floor well away from the ladder when I went outside.  Unless Kathy had been toting a twenty-pound frog up the ladder when she was adjusting the light—and I highly doubted that—then someone had hit her with it. 

I want to go home.  I think I’m going to be sick.  It was Sunny Sparling’s voice. 

Sunny was in her fifties and a towering presence in Hannibal, not just because of her affluence, but also because she had to be at least six feet tall.  She was a renowned drinker, and the air around here was ripe with alcohol fumes, even now.  Her only son, Stephen, who reminded me of a gangling spider with his pale skin, pot belly, and long arms and legs, put his arm around her. 

I’m sure we’ll all get out of here soon, Mother.

Sunny shuddered and turned her bleary eyes to the woman next to her, Evelyn Nicholson.  Evelyn was also in her fifties and Sunny’s lifelong friend.  Evelyn was short and sober.  I always imagined them in an orchard, Sunny picking the upper limbs and Evelyn gathering fruit off the ground.  Of course I’m sure neither of them ever picked fruit in their life.  They probably hired people to buy their fruit for them.

I saw Crane Korbut heading toward the back door, and I knew that if the police didn’t get here soon I’d have an insurrection on my hands.  I was about to say something to him when Blake Hauser stepped in front of the door and blocked Crane’s exit.

I was surprised at Blake’s initiative since he has a black belt in apathy.  He’s a local artist whose muses are named Budweiser and Mary Jane.  He had been the least energetic member of the art committee.

I have to go, Crane insisted.  I have an appointment.

Yeah, well, it can wait.

Crane glowered at Blake but made no move to get around him.

I was relieved to hear sirens, and I headed outside.

I directed the vehicles to the alley in back, then ran to catch up.  The two EMTs ran for the back door, satchels at their sides.  The driver’s side of the unmarked cop car opened and the officer stepped out, then ducked through the back door.  I’d only caught a glimpse of his face in the rain, but already my heart was hammering.  He was Lt. Jimmy Burrell, object of my teenage lust years ago.

Jimmy’s grandparents had lived next door to my parents, so I’d seen him frequently through the years we were growing up.  Jimmy was a year ahead of me in school.  He often shot hoops in his grandparents’ driveway, and I joined him as often as I could.  We talked about a lot of things while we shot baskets.  That’s one thing that can be said for athletic pursuits—they ease conversation.  I don’t remember any adolescent embarrassment ever entering into our discussions.  Actually, Jimmy treated me like one of the boys, which had its good and bad points.  We both went off to college and bumped into each other infrequently since then.

Age had only burnished Jimmy’s allure for me.  What can I say?  I’m a sucker for auburn hair going gray at the temples, blue eyes, great bone structure, and a guy in a suit.  He had the beginnings of a pot belly, which only endeared him to me more.

I hustled in after Jimmy and found him making his way through the crowd toward the paramedics.  He seemed a little bewildered by the throng of Becky Thatchers.  The paramedics looked up as he approached, and they all had a whispered conference.  Jimmy nodded and headed back our way.

Did anyone see what happened?  He scanned our faces.

I shook my head.  We were all outside.  CBS was filming in the street, so we went out to watch.

Everybody?

I’m not sure.  I know that when we came back in, Crane was in the rest room and there was a folding chair in front of the door, but I don’t know about anyone else.

Jimmy looked over the crowd.  Was anyone else in here when it happened? He was met with a chorus of murmured Nos and shaking of heads.

Two more policemen came through the back door then and Jimmy conferred with them in low tones.  They apparently decided on a plan, because one of the policemen asked for Crane, then took him aside.  The other one began taking the names of everyone in the room.

Aretha, did you find her? Jimmy asked grimly.

Yes, but everybody was right behind me.

Let’s go sit down and you can tell me what you know.  He gestured toward the folding chairs that had been set up in the gallery.  He pulled out a notebook and began to take notes as he asked me questions.

What’s her name?

I hesitated and licked my lips.  Well, I said, stalling, I’m pretty sure that it’s Kathy Dennison.  But I’m not positive.

I told him about hearing the two thuds, then trying the front door and finding it locked.  I mentioned again that Crane was in the rest room when we came in through the back door, and there was a folding chair leaning against the rest room door.  And the lights were out.

Jimmy glanced at the brown paper covering the front windows and door glass. You couldn’t see in here from outside?

I shook my head, then covertly slid my eyes over to the body.

Aretha, Jimmy said carefully, I’m afraid she’s dead.  Do you think you’re up to identifying the body?

I didn’t want to wimp out in front of Jimmy, but I also wasn’t crazy about seeing the face beneath the bloody bonnet.  Jimmy looked so solicitous and earnest that I decided to pretend to be a lot more stoic than I was feeling.

Okay.  I stood slowly.  Realized that my hands were shaking, I clasped them together.

Jimmy hesitated a second and then he put his hand on my back.  Take your time.

I have never felt clingy in my life, but I was pretty darn close at the moment.

One of the paramedics knelt by the body, then at a nod from Jimmy he lifted the long ruffled edge of the bonnet.  It took me a minute to tamp down my own queasiness, but I recognized the face.

It’s Kathy.

When we were sitting down again, I gave him her home address.  Eileen had her mother’s name and address on file, and I pulled that from the index box by the cash register.  She just started working for Eileen two weeks ago.  I glanced at Eileen and saw from her pale skin and tight expression that she was in the beginning stages of a migraine.

Is that her car out back?  The Ford Tempo?

Yes.  She had just found the vandalism this morning.  She was really upset.   Did she file a report with us?

I shook my head.  She said the police wouldn’t do anything.  Or words to that effect.  Apparently that kind of stuff had been happening to her a lot lately.  At least that’s the impression I got from talking to her.

What did she say exactly?  Jimmy was still taking notes, and I tried to remember Kathy’s words.

I think she said, ‘They’ll never leave me alone.’  I thought back.  "I remember wondering who they were."

And she didn’t say anything more?

No. 

Eileen stood and slowly walked over to us.  When I hired her she said the reason she’d come back here was to take care of her mother after her car accident.  At the time she said she was tired of looking over her shoulder for the next disaster.  I thought she was exaggerating.  Her last job was selling ad time at the radio station, and her references said she was good at it.  Eileen looked at the body and blanched.

Jimmy frowned down at his notes.

"You don’t think it