Cloudy with a Chance of Answers

By Carolyn Summer Quinn

If you think YOUR family is nuts, wait until you read about this one!  An ominous cloud full of questions has hung over Bethany Barrows' wildly dysfunctional family ever since her little cousin Ashley was abducted from their eccentric Jersey Shore neighborhood in 1988. It's part of a series of unsolved crimes against children. Now, in March 2020, as Covid-19 is starting to disrupt the whole country, Bethany, the last of the Barrows, is back at the shore to close up her late uncle's house. Uncle Ryan was a kindhearted detective who never stopped searching for a solution to the crime that robbed him of his daughter and Bethany is astounded to find what looks like a viable lead while sorting through his possessions. Could it be? Is this the answer she's always been waiting for, and did the old family cold case just turn marvelously hot?

 

CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF ANSWES has won a Literary Titan Silver Book Award, two Firebird International Book Awards (Mystery and Cozy Mystery), has been named an Award Finalist in the American Fiction Awards and a Semi-Finalist in the Chanticleer International Book Awards.  This is a book to enjoy!

• Language: English
• Publisher: Blue Topaz Ocean Enterprises
• Release date: Sep 24, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215756195

Carolyn Summer Quinn

CAROLYN SUMMER QUINN, Author and Fine Art Photographer, grew up singing show tunes in Roselle and Scotch Plains, NJ, a member of an outrageous and rollicking extended family.  She has a B.A. in English and Theater/Media from Kean University and now delights in living in New York City.  She is the Author of 10 books (so far!) and they've garnered 17 writing awards!

Book preview

Dedication:

Once upon a time I lived in Roselle, New Jersey, and had the most wonderful grandfather a little girl could ever want,  Theodore William Yoerger.  He had had many jobs but was also an amateur song and dance man.  His friends called him Teddy, but to me, he was my Pop Pop.  He took me to the park every day, pushed me on the swings, climbed up the sliding pond stairs behind me so I wouldn’t fall, and then raced down to the bottom to be there to catch me.  We were the best buddies imaginable and there’s never been a day in all the years since that I haven’t missed him with all my heart. 

Pop Pop, this book’s for you!

With patience you can drain a brook.

Mit geduld shept men ois a k’val.

—Yiddish Proverb

Be strong now, because things will get better.

It might be stormy now, but it can’t rain forever.

—Unknown

Chapter One

The Last Place to Be

This is the last place I ever wanted to be again, I thought as I walked along the familiar old streets from the bus stop.  The sun had almost begun to set, bathing the bucolic-looking shore town in a soft golden light.

I was back in Ocean Point, New Jersey.

Back to my uncle’s house.  Though my reluctance at being here had nothing to do with my late, kindhearted uncle, who had been my favorite relative, and everything to do with the sad events that had happened here long ago, not to mention the crazy character who lived next door.

The events remained unsolved.

The character still hadn’t moved away.

These days there were even more problems to worry about than just her, though. 

Another neighbor of my uncle’s, Dan Berriman, passed by on the opposite side of the street, giving me a wave.  He was wearing a coronavirus mask, as more and more people were doing.

He wasn’t the only one.  The bus from the Port Authority Bus Terminal in Manhattan that I’d taken to get here only carried about seven other passengers, but four of them were wearing masks, too.  I hadn’t bought one yet, so I had wrapped a long red scarf, twice, around my nose and mouth.  It wasn’t at all comfortable to wear on the hour-and-a-half long bus jaunt, since the vehicle was overheated and I could barely breathe, but at least it was better than nothing, so I didn’t remove it. 

The governor of the state of New Jersey, Phil Murphy, had declared a state of emergency a few days earlier.  There was going to be a shutdown or a lockdown or a quarantine, or something or other like that.  The same thing was about to happen in New York City.  This was unprecedented.  I had, at least, managed to get to New Jersey right before the lockdown was probably about to begin.

The sun was just about to set outside as I let myself in with my key, lugging a voluminous purse and two bags, one a duffel and the other containing my computer laptop and its battery charger.  I was only here again because I was the executor of Uncle Ryan’s will.  The executor by default.  My uncle’s things had to be sorted out and, in some cases, cleared out before I arranged for an estate sale and sold his little house. 

I wanted to get it all done and over with as soon as I could.  I lived in the pretty neighborhood of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn, New York, where I had moved after college, delighted beyond measure to get away from this part of New Jersey after all that had happened here.  I loved New York.  I particularly adored the fact that the New York state motto, Excelsior, was Latin for onward and upward, the very philosophy that had prodded my move the heck away from New Jersey.  I wasn’t back here at the shore for five minutes yet but already missed Brooklyn.  There were other things I needed to be doing up there, like looking for another job.

It was the fourteenth day of March in 2020.  A Saturday.  Partly sunny, partly cloudy.  It would have been a perfectly nice March day if it wasn’t for the fact that a strange new virus was floating around in the air and might just kill us all.

In September I had landed what I thought was a fantastic new position, but long story short, by the middle of January I had a case of bronchitis that just wouldn’t quit.  Bronchitis was a nearly chronic condition for me.  I got it a lot. 

This was the worst version of it I’d ever had, though, and I simply could not stop coughing.  The doctor tried a bunch of different remedies on me, everything from antibiotics to a nebulizer, but for some reason, they were ultra-slow to work.  I wound up coughing so much that I even managed to pull a muscle in my back, and then had that as an additional problem.

That was right about the time when the talking heads on the television found a dangerous new condition to concentrate on, and suddenly the news cycles were becoming increasingly dominated with it.

The new health catastrophe was a Coronavirus that had first put in an appearance in China in 2019.  They were calling it Covid-19, and it was bad to the point that an entire big city in China, Wuhan, with a population of over eleven million, was put on lockdown to try and stop it from spreading.

That didn’t work.  It spread anyway.

Italy went on lockdown next.  Spain was being hit hard by it.  The virus had managed to get around and it was conquering Europe.

It even found its way to Washington state, showing up there.  The uninvited virus had arrived in the U.S.  Massive travel restrictions should have immediately been put in place all over the globe, but while some were, most weren’t.  It was inevitable that New York and New Jersey, states that were overflowing with residents, would be affected sooner rather than later. 

Sure enough, a New York City woman who had gone to Iran came back and was diagnosed with having the virus.  Now there were cases in both states, and they were multiplying daily.

By the end of February, my bronchitis finally got a whole lot better and, miracle of miracles, I almost stopped coughing.  However, it came a little too late.  It hadn’t come fast enough to save my terrific job.

My oaf of an employer had become afraid of my cough, not believing that it was really and truly from a case of bronchitis.  The timing of that worst-ever case of it just could not have been worse.  My wacky little germ-o-phobe of a boss had convinced himself that I had Covid-19, and was a threat to humanity, but of course, he would not say so outright.  Employers never tell the truth when they’re getting rid of employees.  They come up with all kinds of wild excuses for the firing since the one thing boss people are most afraid of is being sued for some kind of wrongful termination.  So one week before boarding the bus to New Jersey to work on my uncle’s house I had been let go from my terrific administration position at a New York City drama school.  I’d wanted to remain working there until I retired, but the little dork I worked for had other plans. 

The reason?  The boss man said, or that is, claimed, he couldn’t figure out how best to utilize me. 

Unbelievable, and a lie if ever there was one.  Boss-jerk basically thought I was Typhoid Mary and he should have at least had the guts to say so outright.  I could respect him for firing me if only he was honest about it.  I would still have been fired, of course, but there wouldn’t have been a deceptive quality to it, making it worse.  Why lie?  I knew I was fired because of that cough, even though by the time I got the boot, it was finally nearly entirely gone. 

Well, so was I, although right after being told I was getting laid off, his euphemism for fired, the boss added that he liked my style, my work ethic, and the way I’d handled every project I’d been given there.  He alleged that he wanted to hire me back at some point, but I was not going to hold my breath while waiting for it to happen.  Meanwhile, straight out the door I was sent, goodbye and good luck.

I went home, called my doctor, and had him write me a doctor’s note, which I emailed over to the boss, stating definitively that I didn’t have Covid-19. 

I received no reply from the boss wimp.

I should have realized that the vainglorious little bastard was nuts on the day he told me he had paid for about thirty-six pairs of prescription glasses so that he never had to wear the same pair to work two days in a row in any given month.  Hello?  Wasn’t this a bit excessive?  Who in their right mind would ever blow money on thirty-six pairs of prescription glasses in the first place? 

A failed actor who wound up running a drama school.  That was who.

When all this was over, maybe I would threaten to sue the self-aggrandized little twerp for everything I could get, except perhaps his collection of spectacles.  I might not even have to go through with an actual lawsuit, just threaten him to see what kind of reaction I’d get.  I bet it would be a classic one.  Tee hee hee.

On the other hand, at least being at loose ends made this the perfect time for me to get Uncle Ryan’s house in order.  I had grown up not in Ocean Point but in the next town over, Atlantic Cove, six blocks and a quick walk away from my uncle’s place.  Ocean Point and Atlantic Cove were like twin shore towns, though Ocean Point was more of a tourist destination, which meant it had the better shops and restaurants.  Atlantic Cove was classier.  It had the coolest old Victorian houses.  Both were connected by a boardwalk along the beach and were home to a large population of graceful seagulls, as well as permanent residents, others who came annually but in the summertime only, and temporary tourists.

My parents had passed away a few years previously in a bad car accident, and I’d been their executor, too, getting our beautiful old Atlantic Cove Victorian house put on the market.  I was familiar with the whole sort-out-the-house routine and even knew what New Jersey company to call to arrange the estate sale, who the best real estate agent was in the area, and the rest of the whole miserable drill.

However, it was surely going to take more than a New York minute for me to get this place on the market.  Uncle Ryan was a retired police detective and, later, an author of true crime books.  He’d moved into the house all the way back in 1972.  It was a 1930’s two-story bungalow, with a cellar and an attic, and it was overflowing with papers, books, files, and just plain too much stuff.  The task was going to be nothing less than gargantuan and it was all falling to me.  Oh, joy. 

Yet it was one of those things that simply had to be done, and as long as I had wound up unexpectedly unemployed anyway, during this strange time when the whole world seemed to be heading toward a quarantine thanks to the out-of-control virus that didn’t yet have a cure or a vaccine, now was as good time as any to get right to it. 

The trouble was that this part of Ocean Point made me uneasy.

Or, more specifically, it was Uncle Ryan’s street, Alhambra Lane, that gave me the willies, though that was through no fault of my uncle’s, and it had nothing to do with the town or the neighborhood either. 

Just a certain neighbor. 

The one next door.

Celeste Sanderson.  Mystery woman of my childhood.

Make that crazy mystery woman.

The idea of staying alone in this house, right next to hers, for the week or so it was going to take me to sort out Uncle Ryan’s place did not appeal to me at all. 

I suppose every town has a Celeste Sanderson in it somewhere.  There’s always one.  It’s the person who freaks out if an acquaintance walks by their place, convinced they’re being watched or even spied upon, no matter how much evidence there might be to the contrary.  It’s the one who will build a fence around their property so that, God forbid, no one can see whatever’s going on in there, even if it’s something as innocent as a gathering involving hamburgers, hot dogs, and a barbecue grill.  It’s the head case who’s forever ready to call the cops if you so much as happen to glance in their almighty direction, convinced you’re up to no good when, maybe, you’re just trying to wave a friendly hello and go on with your own business.

Celeste is the type of nut who thinks everyone else’s business is, somehow or other, all wrapped up in her business.  Even when it isn’t.  That was how she’d been regarding me since 1987.

The real truth, initially, had been that I couldn’t have cared less about her.  I wouldn’t even have noticed her very much at all, thank you, until she started making an overblown issue out of all sorts of everything derived from absolutely nothing, and then, voila, I noticed her.  Ha, she left me no choice.

Which may very well have been what she wanted in the first place, a whole lot of attention to make herself feel important.

I was eleven years old when I first became acquainted with Miss Celeste Sanderson, and she made my life hell simply for walking down the street to visit my Uncle Ryan, my Aunt Stella, and my little cousin Ashley.

Ashley. 

Oh, God. 

Ashley. 

That wonderful little girl with the silvery laugh. 

Another thing I was going to have to do here was to go into Ashley’s old room, though it wasn’t kept like a regular child’s bedroom any longer at all.  Uncle Ryan’s wife, Aunt Stella, had preserved it more like a shrine, ever since poor Ashley had died when I had just come to the end of the seventh grade and Ashley had finished the fifth.  After my aunt up and left him, Uncle Ryan didn’t have the heart to dismantle his late daughter’s room any more than Stella had.  It was still 1988 in there.  Not 2020.

I remembered what my loudmouthed grandmother had said to my uncle about that room after Ashley was gone, at a moment when Stella wasn’t within earshot.  Absolutely nothing good whatsoever is going to come out of Stella enshrining your daughter’s stuff, Ryan.  You would do well to give away as much of it as possible, whether your wife likes it or not.  Some poor slum kids could use those toys and clothes in there.  Call in Goodwill to cart it away.  It's nothing but a reminder.  Get rid of it all and Stella might be able to adjust to the girl’s loss faster and begin to move forward, not go in there to mope on the bed with Ashley’s stuffed animals.  But he didn’t.

That was another reason why this whole area of New Jersey, not to mention this street and this house, made me unsettled, if not downright apprehensive.  All three members of that part of my family, Stella, Ryan, and Ashley, weren’t here any longer.  Two had died, and one had taken off running, so now all three were well and truly gone.  Even when I’d been over here to visit my uncle when he was still alive, the absence of Ashley and Stella rattled me the minute I came through the door, and now Uncle Ryan would never be here again, either. 

I was in their house, and they weren’t.  I was left with nothing but big, gaping, invisible holes in my life where Ryan, Ashley and Stella should have been.  I no longer had my parents or impossible grandmother, either.  All of them were gone, and I was the last of the Barrows.

I sighed as I went into Ryan’s kitchen and put a hazelnut-flavored K-cup into the single-serve coffee maker.  If Ashley had lived, she’d be the executor of her dad’s will, not me.  Little blonde, blue-eyed Ashley with the dimpled cheeks and sunny disposition.  Poor kid.  She’d been killed in a hit-and-run accident after having been abducted by a predator.  It was believed that she probably died while escaping from the creep, running for her life.  The abduction part of the whole tragedy was an unsolved cold case even yet, still on the books at the Ocean Point Police Department.  The bane of Uncle Ryan’s life had been that as good a detective as he was, in all these years he hadn’t been able to find out who had killed his only daughter.

The end of Ashley had also meant the end of Aunt Stella.  Within several months of Ashley’s passing, Stella, originally from Tottenham, North London, England, had packed her bags and left my uncle, Ocean Point, and everyone she knew around here behind, fleeing from this town and never coming back.  We never even knew if she’d returned to Tottenham or went someplace else.  She just took off, sprinting away from us all as fast as she could, and was never heard from again.  I had no idea if she was still alive, and if so, if she even was aware that her husband had recently died.  As far as I knew, Uncle Ryan hadn’t divorced her because he didn’t know where to send the papers.  He also didn’t have the heart to make their separation official.

My father had patiently explained to me, at the time, that a breakup of the parents was not at all unusual in cases where a child dies, since it’s so unnatural for the kid to pass away before the parents that it creates a huge strain on their relationship.  I had loved Aunt Stella, and as far as I had ever seen she’d been a perfectly happy wife and mother, but then you never knew about that.

Back then I had hoped Aunt Stella would resurface one day, come to her senses, and return to my heartbroken uncle.  It hadn’t happened.

Outside, the sun had already set, the sky had grown darker, and I sighed.  Between Uncle Ryan’s papers, Ashley’s shrine of a bedroom, the still unsolved case, and the lunatic next door, this was going to be one hell of a week.  So when the coffee was ready I sat down by the kitchen window to drink it, black since there wasn’t any unspoiled milk in the house, and vowed to start clearing everything out tomorrow, not tonight.

And that’s when I saw something strange going on. 

Where else? 

Next door.

Chapter Two

Situation Normal: They’re Fouled Up

It was Celeste Sanderson , of course.  Wherever strangeness happened to be, Celeste was sure to follow.

First, she turned on the back porch light.  Then she turned it off.  Then it came on again, and off again, and on one more time.  It was beginning to seem like a strobe light show.  Off again, on again.  Unbelievable.  And at that point, Celeste came out of her house in her pajamas, on patrol, no doubt, a sentinel without a war.

I knew what had attracted her attention.  Me.  Or, rather, the fact that a light was on in the kitchen of her dead neighbor the cop, which meant somebody was over here.  Celeste probably immediately thought there was a burglary in progress, or better yet, since she was probably still a working teacher, believed perhaps it was a Board of Education espionage agent charged with putting her under surveillance.  Anything but a reluctant relative come to handle an estate.

Oh God, I am not up for this.  Wasn’t there enough for me to contend with at the moment?  The list included my uncle’s death, a house to clear out, my vanishing aunt, my late cousin, the cold case, the need for a new job, an international pandemic, and now, this.  The hefty horror that was looming right across the lawn and on the other side of the split-rail fence.

However, I figured I’d better take as much control of the situation as I could get before she summoned the police force, the United States Army, or the CIA to investigate whatever she thought was happening over here, so even though I didn’t want to, I opened the back door.  Time for some insincere greetings.

Hey there, Miss Sanderson!  Hello.  It’s been a long time.  I – 

Before I could say who I was and what I was doing here, she demanded, "Bethany Barrows?  Is – that - you?"

It was almost completely dark out by then.  The light from her porch was rather dim.  The light on my porch wasn’t even on, but she either recognized me, or pretended she did.  She’d probably actually already seen me arrive late that afternoon when the sun hadn’t completely set yet from whatever spy perch she maintained inside her fortress of a house.

That house genuinely did look a little bit more like a fort than a domicile.  This was no exaggeration on my part.  It was a sort of one-story flat adobe white stucco place, complete with thick wooden doors and wrought iron vertical bars protecting the windows. Security cameras were perched above the front door, monitoring the front walk as though it was the pathway to a United States mint. 

Chez Sanderson was unique among most of the rest of the homes in the beach town of Ocean Point.  Most were a plethora of old Victorians, funky bungalows, or low-slung ranches with a semi-nautical ambiance, anchors in the front yards, glass floats hanging like plants from the front porch rafters, and so on.  At least half the houses in town were only occupied in the summer months, either by people who wanted the small luxury of a house down the shore for themselves or kept places here just so they could rent them out to tourists by the week or the month.  We laughingly called those part-time residents and tourists our summertime irregulars.  They’re great for the economy around here, Uncle Ryan used to say, but not much else.  The town was half deserted once the summer season ended, and they all went home.  Same deal with my town six blocks away, Atlantic Cove.

This Sanderson place, in contrast to the rest of the area, could have passed for a prison at a small wild west outpost, bars and all.  Celeste had probably had her house made to order from plans she, her sister, and her late parents had created themselves.  The only thing missing was a moat filled with alligators to keep out dangerous visitors, like the paper boy, the postman, and me. 

Why, yes, Miss Sanderson.  It’s me.  Bethany Barrows, the one and only!  I made a little curtsy.  Take that!  And I thought to myself while I made it that you’d better not cause me any problems, you psycho old bitch, let alone go berserk and take potshots at me or worse. 

"What are you doing here?"  This wasn’t asked but barked.

What the hell was it to her?  Getting my uncle’s house ready for sale.  And before she could ask any more questions, or pry for additional information, I added, Good night, Miss Sanderson.  Sweet dreams!  And closed the door.

Then I made sure I locked it, with both of Uncle Ryan’s locks plus the chain.  For good measure, I jimmied a kitchen chair in front of the door handle, too.  If Celeste was watching from her back steps, and she surely still was, that might get to her.  Tee hee hee.

When I was a kid that damn Celeste initially thought I wasn’t truly related to Detective Ryan Barrows at all, as crazy as that was, and it was obviously way far out there.  I was in her art class back then at the Atlantic Cove Middle School.  It made no sense.  My last name was Barrows, just like his, and with my green eyes and brown hair, I looked more like him than his own daughter, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed English rose of a child who resembled her very British mother.

Strange, though.  When I had been in the