Bad News Travels Fast

By Maureen Milliken

When Appalachian Trail thru-hiker Lydia Manzo becomes lost in the woods of Maine, then is found dead, it sets off a chain of events that upsets the fragile peace of Redimere, Maine. While state investigators are sure Lydia killed herself, some in Redimere are sure that she was murdered.

Could Lydia have been a victim of the dangerous fugit

• Language: English
• Publisher: Nevermore Mystery Press
• Release date: Jan 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798989451555

Maureen Milliken

Maureen always wanted to be two things: a journalist and a mystery writer. She's lucky to be both. Her debut mystery novel, Cold Hard News, set in her home state of Maine, combines her love for the area with her love for journalism. And lots of murder, of course.Maureen is a newspaper editor and columnist and blogs at maureenmilliken.comShe lives in central Maine with her loyal hound, Emma, and her equally loyal cat, Binti.

Book preview

CHAPTER 1

Bernie O'Dea stood in the dirt parking lot in the early evening heat. It was too damn hot for Maine in June. Humid and buggy. But she noticed those things out of habit, they didn’t bother her the way they usually did. She stared at the trail that crossed the meadow where Lydia Manzo’s body had been carried out three days earlier, as though it would tell her what she needed to know.

She’d gotten in her car and roared north as soon as she heard the voicemail from Pete. She knew he wouldn’t be there—he’d sent it hours earlier. But she was there anyway.

It was the same time of day as when they brought Lydia out. That was a coincidence. The meadow was a riot of early summer wildflowers, delicate yellows and purples, some bright orange. The mountains beyond, lit by the setting sun off to the west, were green and dark-blue humps, covered with forest. They looked cool and welcoming. It was all a lie. The mountains, the thick woods and unforgiving terrain, had taken Lydia’s life. Now they had Pete. She had an awful feeling he was never going to come out.

Her cellphone rang. She didn’t want to answer, but it was Sandy and if she didn’t, he’d probably come after her.

Are you up in Carrabassett? he asked.

She didn’t want to say. This was going to be the rest of her life, she could see that. A bewildered daze punctuated by unwelcome blips of life that she didn’t want to deal with.

I’m at the trailhead by the Sugarloaf Airport.

She could picture him in his office behind the firetruck bay, his feet on his desk, twirling the phone cord as he tried to figure out how best to talk the crazy woman back into the safe embrace of reality.

What’re you doing? It’ll be dark soon. It’s too late to go after him. His voice was careful, too soothing. It annoyed her. The annoyance felt good, though, a break from the panic.

I’m just here. Don’t worry.

Come back to Redimere. We can have a beer and hash things over.

Are you kidding me?

I don’t mean that, he said. I mean actually have a beer and hash things over. I know you two are back together. But you’re upset and need to talk to someone.

Don’t worry. She hung up. Sandy didn’t have to worry. She wasn’t going to wander into the woods. She had a newspaper to put out, a dog and cats to feed. She wasn’t going to vanish, like Lydia did.

Like Pete had.

Okay, he hadn’t vanished. He’d intended to go on the hike for months, but he was supposed to leave Thursday, not this afternoon, three days early.

Her phone buzzed. She ignored it, willing the mountains to tell her something. Anything. She could hear cars pulling off Route 27 into the parking lot of the Lazy Logger Café, but the lot at the trailhead behind it, where she was, was deserted. Aside from the occasional car, it was quiet. If the mountains had anything to say, she’d hear it. They were dead quiet.

She got back in her car, defeated. Her phone buzzed again. What? she said.

Bernie, Pete’s fine. Please come home, Sandy said.

I don’t understand anything. She started crying.

It’s just been a bad few days.

Bad year, more like it. She didn’t respond. Why bother? He knew.

I shouldn’t have told you about Lydia, he said.

That doesn’t have anything to do with it. It did, but the facts of Lydia’s death—the secret, unprintable facts—were trumped by Pete leaving.

Bernadette, sweetheart.

Don’t sweetheart me, she said. "I’m pissed off. Lydia’s dead. It was bad enough when it was suicide. But then Friday you said it was murder, and that pissed me off more. Then you said I couldn’t write anything until the medical examiner’s report came out. Well, it did, and it didn’t say anything about murder. Now you’ve gone back on the whole thing. And guess what? The police chief, who happens to be my boyfriend, has taken off with barely a word into the same goddam woods. Sorry, sweetheart doesn’t do it for me."

I’m sorry, he said. I’m upset, too.

I just had to get away to think, Bernie said. If she was going to be mad at anyone, Sandy didn’t deserve it. I gotta go. She flipped her phone shut and leaned back against the seat. The real explanation of why she’d raced up to the woods wouldn’t make sense to him. It barely did to her. She wanted to see where Pete had gone into the woods and understand why. It was getting dark now. The longest day of the year had come and gone a week ago. The days were getting shorter, darkness would come faster. Soon, in the coming weeks, it would start squeezing from both sides until there was no light at all.

She started the car and bumped through the dirt parking lot back out to Route 27 and home.

Bernie had a half-hour, give or take, depending on how she drove and whether she hit a deer, to hash things over. She knew the minute she crossed the town line she’d start obsessing about Pete again. For now, she tried to make sense of the Lydia thing.

She worked backwards, from when Sandy and his unofficial search crew had found Lydia Friday afternoon, dead in her bright purple tent, initial ruling suicide. It was a spot where searchers a month ago, in the first frenzied days of her disappearance, would have passed close enough to hear her cough, or maybe cry out, if she’d been in any condition to do either.

But they hadn’t. The search had moved up the Appalachian Trail. As the days turned into weeks, Bernie knew Lydia probably wouldn’t be found alive. Maine’s northern woods were unforgiving—the terrain brutal, the vastness underrated. No cell service, no one to hear you shout for help.

Friday night, when Sandy, voice low so no one else would hear, told her that no, it wasn’t suicide, like they’d first thought, Bernie believed him. But no one else said anything that night about it, or acted like it was anything but suicide. She’d been at enough crime scenes in her two-plus decades as a journalist to know the signs when they thought it was homicide. Those signs seemed to be there. Sandy was experienced in search and rescue, and as a rural fire chief had seen countless bodies that had met their end in a mind-blowing variety of ways. He wasn’t given to flights of fancy. But still, no one said anything.

Over the weekend, when she’d still been rational, she’d tried to weigh the likelihood of Sandy being wrong against the likelihood of him being right. It kept coming back on the side of him being right.

Suicide hadn’t seemed likely in the first place. Lydia getting lost and dying, for that matter, seemed just as unlikely. Bernie should know, she’d been writing about Lydia for five months.

A few hours before she learned Pete had left, and taken off on her pointless drive north, she’d gotten an email from the state police with the medical examiner’s report confirming suicide. So, Sandy had been wrong? She didn’t buy it. It didn’t feel right on so many levels. Still, as she wrote what she realized would probably be one of the last Lydia Manzo stories her newspaper, the Peaks Weekly Watcher, would publish. Lydia was dead and there were too many questions and now she was being told that they weren’t going to be answered. Frustration piled on top of shock and sadness.

She didn’t know as she wrote that Pete was on his way to the mountains. If she had, she wouldn’t have been able to write at all.

She tried to capture, as much as she could, the unexpected and tragic end to an adventure that had started out so well months before. It’d been a great story: The upbeat, tenacious hiker from Buffalo, New York, recently retired nurse, divorced mother of two grown children, hiking the Appalachian Trail. She had to finish the 2,179-mile hike in time for her son’s late July wedding, an added layer of drama.

If things had gone as planned, just about now Bernie would’ve been writing about Lydia’s triumphant summit of Mount Katahdin, the northern end of the trail.

But things hadn’t gone as planned. Not at all.

Lydia’s plan went to hell the first week of June when she didn’t meet her friends in Caratunk. It was one of their scheduled meeting spots, thirty-seven miles from Wyman Township, where they’d put her back on the trail after she spent part of Memorial Day weekend in Redimere, Bernie’s town.

The friends, Crystal and LeeAnne—fellow nurses, the self- proclaimed Woo Hoo Girls—had been her support staff since March. They knew after three months of it that schedules were more suggestions than anything else, but Lydia missed the twenty-four hours-before we panic window, something she’d never done in the months she’d been on the trail. Her friends hiked back from the meeting point looking for her. They asked the few other hikers they encountered. There weren’t many this time of year in the western Maine high peaks that gave the newspaper its name. This part of the world was just waking up from another endless winter. No one had seen her.

Then Friday, as the wet late-spring days slid into humid, buggy, early summer, Lydia was found. She was half a mile from the trail, not far from where she’d set out four weeks earlier. The information flow that gushed from the state investigators while Lydia was missing shut down.

Then, that morning, the medical examiner’s report and the terse state police news release that accompanied it arrived. She’d expected so much more.

Had that just been that morning? Now, driving back to town as the sun set, she wished she’d talked to Pete more when she got it. Not because of the Lydia story, but because now he was gone. He sounded so matter-of-fact in his voicemail when he said he was going, not final at all. So why did she keep feeling like it was?

CHAPTER 2

Pete knew it was too late in the day for much hiking, but he could at least get into the woods. He hadn’t thought much about it when he’d decided to leave, he just knew he needed that dark stillness now, not three days from now. He tried to tell himself he wasn’t running from something, that he was running to something. Bernie would have called him on that. Cliché alert! It made him smile as he started across the meadow, the sound of Sandy’s pickup tearing out of the parking lot still ringing in his ears.

The sun was dropping in the sky and mid-afternoon hot. He was already sweating. He wished Bernie had picked up when he called. He knew a voicemail wasn’t enough. He’d checked his phone after he put his pack on, but she hadn’t called back or texted. He hadn’t explained it well to her in the message. Didn’t explain at all, really. He’d been so desperate to go. Now he was out of cell range and it was a moot point. He turned the phone off and put it back in his pack. For the next week it’d just be a useless chunk of plastic and microchips.

He reached the edge of the meadow and let out the breath he’d been holding. Stepping into the woods was like stepping into a cave, or a portal to another world. The temperature dropped. Even the drone of the mosquitos changed.

The need to go had been building since yesterday. One little blow after another. He was still stunned by how fast everything had come crashing down on his head in the last twenty-four hours, after he’d been balancing things so well.

There’d been Sandy, pissed off, standing at Pete’s desk that morning, demanding that he do something about the state police closing the Lydia Manzo case.

Sandy had known since Saturday that the state police were going to rule it suicide, so Pete wasn’t sure what he’d been expecting. Sandy said he thought they’d wait to make that ruling public. Wait? For what?

Friday night, Pete had told Sandy he’d see what he could do. Now, Monday, Sandy thought Pete had turned around on it, that he didn’t believe him after all. Pete had been too exhausted, his headache crushing his ability to think, to explain. Truthfully, too, he didn’t feel like he owed it to Sandy, didn’t see one good reason, to make Sandy feel better.

Sandy knew that, too.

I wonder if the fact you believed me Friday about Lydia, but not today isn’t about Lydia at all, he said. Dawna, his sergeant, was there, too, her concern making Pete feel dishonest and kind of like a jerk.

Here’s the deal with Lydia, Pete said to them. The state police told me Saturday, out of professional courtesy, that they’d ruled it suicide. I appreciated it, given how pissed off they were that the town’s fire chief, my most junior officer, and Lydia’s two friends, who in no way should have been involved, went bumbling into the woods on a tip that they didn’t even bother to tell anyone about.

They were pissed because we found her and they couldn’t, Sandy said. We didn’t go bumbling. I know what I’m doing. This is totally different from what you said Friday. Saturday, too.

Pete knew Sandy was right, but that didn’t change the script. Do you have any idea how much shit I had to eat with George Libby when I saw him yesterday? He’s not a fan of ours as it is, and he sure as hell isn’t a fan of yours. I wasn’t going to argue with the lead investigator on the case about what the Redimere fire chief may or may not have seen.

I know what I saw, Sandy said. You’ve seen more homicides in a year on your last job than Libby will see his whole career. You can force the issue.

No, I can’t, Pete said. His head was going to split wide open. That was Philly. This is Maine. I might as well be a pastry chef for all they care. The state is done with the case. Anything but suicide doesn’t make sense. It’s a waste of resources to pursue it when they have so many other things going on, including trying to catch an actual murderer who’s been at large for weeks. I don’t know how many times I can say it. We’re done with this.

·····

Dawna stayed after Sandy left. He could see her questions, the compassion and understanding behind them. He didn’t deserve it. He knew she wouldn’t let him deflect her. It’s one of the reasons she made such a good sergeant. As she talked, he didn’t disagree with anything she said. He was ashamed she had to say it. Still, her last line had left him cold.

You’re in a position where a bad decision could cost someone their life.

She nailed it. It was one of the things that had been haunting him the last few months, creeping into his nightmares and lately into his days. Things had been quiet since November, everything was okay. Bernie was okay. Better than okay, when it related to him. Things had calmed down after a horrific year. But he couldn’t shake it. He thought time would smooth his issues out, but they were getting worse. Dawna saw it, too.

The shame of that conversation didn’t ease as the woods thickened around him. He knew it would take a while to decompress. He hoped he could get past kicking himself and start thinking about Lydia’s case, the lifeline he was hanging onto to prove he actually was okay.

He turned onto an unmarked trail that followed a stream. He had an idea of where he was going, but he’d figure it out more specifically in the morning. For now, he’d just find a spot to camp for the night.

The worst, but not the final, blow in a day that just kept getting shittier came when he’d told Vicki he had a headache and was taking the afternoon off.

She handed him a package. This came in the mail, she’d said. Must be a late birthday present.

She had no idea she’d just handed him a bomb. Actually, he wished it had been a bomb. Because when he took it home and opened it, what was inside was worse.

He stopped at a clear spot next to the stream. It was already getting dark, and when night came in the woods, it came fast. He took out his paraffin burner and collapsible pot. He loved the neatness and efficiency of camping. He didn’t even bring a tent or sleeping bag, just a blanket roll. He had water from home, but that was for drinking. He scooped some out of the stream and put it on the burner to boil. He sat back against a tree. His headache had faded. He took a deep breath, counted to four, then let it out on four beats. A trick he’d learned from his counselor in Philly to keep the panic attacks at bay. He was skeptical about the Midnight Rambler, Bernie’s obsessive and impressive research aside. Still, he often thought how good the guy had it, if he actually existed. Living like this all the time. Pete knew it was a romantic fantasy. Maybe that’s why some people believed in him. In reality, it’d be a miserable, lonely life. Though the way his day had gone, how much more miserable could his life be?

·····

The final punch, one of Pete’s own making, the cherry on top of the shit sundae he’d made for himself, was that he’d decided maybe he and Sandy could talk after all.

By the time Sandy got to Pete’s house to drive him to the trailhead, reality had seeped in. Pete was in no condition for the discussion.

As they sped up Route 27, he and Sandy squabbled like teenage boys. Sandy came right out first thing and said he knew Pete wouldn’t back him up about Lydia because he’d found out about him and Bernie. Sandy made it clear he didn’t have anything to apologize for. Pete normally would have agreed, but nothing was normal now.

You didn’t waste any time, did you? Pete said.

You told her it was a clean break. You didn’t want to hold her back from finding someone.

She told you that? Pete wondered how much of that terrible inarticulate conversation of a month ago she’d repeated to Sandy.

She was devastated and needed someone to talk to.

"And you just happened to be there. And talk? Give me a break."

We’re friends, so we did talk. Some. Like I said, you told her to find someone else.

I know what I told her. Pete cringed with shame as he thought about the breakup conversation with Bernie. It was different from the shame he felt with Dawna. He’d felt it with Sandy, too. But it didn’t stop him from being a dick.

How’d you know? Sandy asked. I know she didn’t tell you.

It was such a small thing. Sunday morning, he’d tossed a wet towel in Bernie’s dirty laundry basket, then thought better of it. He pulled it out, and there it was. One of those faded blue Redimere FD T-shirts with CHIEF in white letters on the sleeve that Sandy wore all the time. It’d sent him reeling as Bernie chattered away from the bathroom.

It doesn’t matter, Pete said. He didn’t want to give Sandy the satisfaction of realizing the shock Pete had felt. His stupid befuddlement. How much it hurt. What matters is you took advantage of her. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Sandy’s grip tighten on the wheel.

"Seriously? I’ve got news for you. She’s a big girl and she knew exactly what she was doing. Exactly."

Pete’s headache, which had grown and bloomed as the day wore on, had exploded when he saw the contents of his father’s package. Now, as he and Sandy nipped at each other, it jackhammered in time with his heart. The dumpster-garbage smell, the companion to his migraines, choked him. Rational thinking was twisted out of shape. All he felt was anger. He didn’t care if it didn’t make sense. He knew Sandy wasn’t his father, or his stepfather, but he was here and they weren’t.

She was vulnerable. You couldn’t wait to pounce.

Sandy took a deep breath. She needed someone to show her she was lovable and wanted. I fit the bill. She needed a man. I’m not just talking about the physical shit, right? She needed a man who’d be strong for her, who’d act like a man.

This wasn’t the conversation Pete had pictured, back when he still thought they’d have a grownup-to-grownup conversation. When was that? It felt like a different life. The car in front of them was going about ten miles under the fifty-five limit. Sandy wanted to get past, probably couldn’t get away from Pete fast enough. He was tailgating, nowhere to pass on the curving two-lane. He inched the pickup over the center line, then swerved back as a logging truck rounded a curve and roared toward them.

You broke her heart, Sandy said.

They passed the sign welcoming them to Carrabassett Valley: Once you’ve been here, your life will never be the same. Every time they drove by it, Bernie said, Yeah, but is that good or bad?

Pete breathed in, held it, counted to four.

She had—has—so much faith in you that she figured if you broke up with her, your reasons were good enough that it wasn’t gonna be fixed. It took a lot to piss Sandy off, but Pete had managed to. It began with the discussion about Lydia Manzo that morning, and now this. His voice had an edge Pete had never heard before. We both agreed from the start it was just physical, if that makes you feel any better. I didn’t think we needed to keep it a secret, but she didn’t want to hurt you.

Why the hell would that make me feel better? Pete saw Sandy look at him in his peripheral vision, but he didn’t look back, kept his eyes on the Carrabassett River rushing to their right. Breathe in. Hold it. Breathe out. What hurt almost as much as the affair was the fact that Pete had poured his heart out to Sandy the previous Wednesday, about what a mistake he’d made, about how he was going to ask her to take him back. He cringed at how he, without embarrassment at the time, had wiped away tears as he talked. Burned, now, with the humiliation of it all. How when he’d said, At least it’s too soon for her to have found someone else, Sandy said something like She loves you too much to fall for someone else anyway. Then, Saturday, before he went to Bernie, he’d stopped by Sandy’s. He’d given him a beer and a pep talk. No hint at all that anything had been going on.

Sandy finally passed the car he’d been tailgating and floored the gas. I can take it, he said If you’re not going to support me about Lydia because of this, that’s your problem. I’m a little shocked. I thought a lot more of you than that, but whatever. But Bernie doesn’t deserve it. She may have slept with me, but her heart was with you. You don’t even get how lucky that makes you.

The breathing exercise wasn’t working. Pete dug his fingernails into his palms, trying to fight the urge to open the door and fall out. Could feel himself bouncing on pavement. Anything to get away from the rising panic, the hot dumpster death smell.

I don’t need relationship advice from the guy with three divorces under his belt, he said. Petty, he knew. Small. He breathed in slowly. Held it.

Actually, it looks like you do.

Do you love her? He hated himself for asking but couldn’t help it.

I’m not even going to answer that, Sandy said. She loves you, so even if I did, it’s a moot point.

They turned onto the gravel drive that took them behind the Lazy Logger Café to the trailhead. Sandy slowed and pulled aside for a Jeep full of teenagers with mountain bikes, the loud thump of bass drowning out everything else. It made Pete’s head throb dark red blasts. For a minute he thought he was going to vomit, but the kids turned north onto 27 and the noise faded away.

As Sandy’s truck pulled up by the trailhead, Pete said, Guys like you just do whatever you want with women, like they’re nothing, treat them like garbage, hurt them, then act like it’s her choice, not your fault. He got out of the truck before Sandy came to a stop.

Sandy slammed on the brakes and got out, too, coming around the truck as Pete lifted out his pack, shouldered it and began adjusting the straps. He wondered if Sandy was going to deck him here in this sunny parking lot, where Friday night—a lifetime ago—they’d stood together, best friends, waiting for Lydia’s remains to be brought out.

Sandy, four inches taller and a good forty pounds heavier, walked toward Pete. Pete braced for a blow. He didn’t even think he’d fight back at this point. But Sandy stopped, his arms folded tight, hands tucked under his armpits, making it clear if anyone was going to throw a punch, it’d have to be Pete.

What the hell are you even talking about? Sandy asked. I wouldn’t treat Bernie like that, or any woman. You know that. Where did that come from? What the hell is wrong with you?

Sandy looked hurt, confused. Pete hated himself, but he couldn’t stop the monster let loose by that package from his father, from the months, no, the years, he knew now, of anger and self-loathing that had been building up, just waiting for this day.

Try to keep your fucking paws off my girl while I’m gone, Pete said.

He saw Sandy’s hands, still tucked in his armpits, curl into fists. Good.

I know the pain you’ve gone through. I feel for you, Sandy said. If I caused you more by sleeping with Bernie, I’m sorry. Seriously. You’ve been a brother to me, no matter what. I thought you felt the same way. But if you’d rather be this asshole, this guy I don’t even know, do everybody a favor and get lost like Lydia did.

He got back in the truck and roared out of the lot, spitting gravel.

Pete didn’t like the guy he was any more than Sandy did. Less. Now, in the cool dark, he wished he’d been able to rein it in.

He wished he’d tried harder to talk to Bernie before he left.

He wished a lot of things, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it now.

CHAPTER 3

Bernie drove down Main Street, not sure if she should go to the office and finish some of the work she’d blown off for her pointless drive, or just go home and stew all night.

The town’s cruiser was in the parking lot of the Pizza Bowl. For a split second her heart soared. Less than a split second. It was a Pavlovian reaction. A roller-coaster Pavlovian ride the last few months. Thanks for nothing Pavlov. She pulled up next to the cruiser and got out. Dawna rolled down the window.

Hey, can I come in? Bernie asked.

Yeah, get out of the bugs, Dawna said. I heard you went up looking for Pete.

Not exactly. Sandy’s being dramatic, Bernie said as she got into the air-conditioned cruiser. It made her feel a little better. Less exhausted.

Pete’ll be okay, Dawna said.

From where they sat, Bernie could see down Main Street. The Watcher building was two blocks down, its peeling yellow clapboard just visible across the street from the bright and busy Country Grocer. Down at their end of the row of one and two-story wood and brick buildings, most closed for the night, things were quiet aside from faint music from the Pizza Bowl, an occasional car arriving or leaving, someone laughing or calling good-night.

Hard to believe Fourth of July is in less than a week, Bernie said. The calm before the storm.

Bernie had never been a summer person. When she’d lived in the cities of central New England, summer just meant it was warm out. Everyone was working. Sure, people talked about their weekend at the beach or vacation plans. Came into work with tans on top of their newsroom pallor, but it was business as usual. Back in Maine, though, in a town where the population doubles in July and August, she felt it keenly. Quiet as downtown may be, on the lakes and rivers, the pockets of camps, the lodges and B&Bs, half of the town was having a party, up late, firecrackers going off, music playing. She could hear it as she lay in bed at night. She got it. They lived fifty weeks a year for the two weeks they could come up here and relax. She was in a parallel universe where people got up early and went to work, required sleep, and wouldn’t know a firecracker if it floated to the top of their morning coffee.

I’m glad the Fourth is on a Sunday, Dawna said. It’ll keep the chaos confined to a couple days, hopefully.

That’s another thing Bernie forgot until she moved back to Maine—the whole state shuts down for a week for the Fourth, the official start of summer. Don’t try to get too much business done anywhere in the state, no one’s around. In fact, some of them are right here in Redimere, setting off firecrackers and blasting music at one a.m.

Here’s hoping, Bernie said.

I just want a nice, uneventful week, Dawna said. No surprises.

Why’d he go? Bernie asked. I know he was going on that hike. He’s planned it for months. But he was going to leave Thursday. He left me a voicemail today, but it didn’t say much. I didn’t see it until hours after he called. She was glad she sounded better now than when she’d talked to Sandy, but she didn’t feel any better.

I think he just really needed a break. You know, after last year, he didn’t want to be here on the Fourth, Dawna said. I told him it was fine, the rest of us could hold down the fort.

Did something happen today?