Ghost Sudoku (2 page)

After speaking on the radio, Wish brought the plane in for a landing. He helped Liza disembark, handed out her luggage, and then taxied off. As soon as flight control gave the okay, he was airborne again, off to Seattle.

Liza, however, still had miles to go before she got home. And her car was where she’d left it after sneaking out of town—in the long-term parking lot at Portland Airport. She reached into her shoulder bag to call for a cab—and then pulled a face when her cell phone didn’t light up.

Great,
she thought,
the battery died somewhere during my travels.

Jamming the phone back in the bag, Liza tried to remember if she’d noticed a pay phone anywhere around the scatter of buildings surrounding the tarmac. Just as she began to give up hope, a voice called her name.

Liza turned to see Jimmy Perrine waving his battered Stetson. His long salt-and-pepper hair was pulled back in a scruffy ponytail, and he wore a Hawaiian shirt in nearly radioactive colors. “That plane you rode in on wasn’t much better than my crate.”

Jimmy had piloted her a time or two. Essentially, he was happy to fly just about anywhere as long as his passenger paid for the fuel.

Liza decided to try her luck and ask if Jimmy would do the same for ground transportation. He actually agreed to take her to Maiden’s Bay without even asking for gas money. She climbed into the cab of his pickup after stowing her bags in the back, and off they went.

As they took the highway along the coast, the bay looked almost supernaturally blue and pretty, as if it were posing for photographers from the state tourism bureau. Liza wasn’t taken in by the view of the sun on the waters—she’d crawled along the road in dense fog and seen the bay lead gray with whitecaps torn by blizzardy winds. Still, she decided to take advantage of the nice weather, rolling down the window—something she hadn’t been able to do on Wish’s plane.

“Haven’t seen you around lately,” Jimmy said as they drove along. He glanced back at the luggage in the truck bed. “Guess you were traveling.”

“Just taking a break,” Liza told him. “This is the time of year for it, right?”

He nodded. “Guess so. Saw your face on TV, though.”

Liza grimaced. After that wild and woolly case at the sudoku tournament,
she’d
gotten sick of seeing her face on the box. “With luck, that should all be over by now.”

“Think so?” Jimmy glanced at her in surprise and seemed about to say something more.

“That’s the way I’d like it,” Liza said.

Jimmy just shrugged and turned back to the road. Liza dragged out her defunct cell phone and examined it. “Damned useless thing.”

“Not working?”

“And I don’t know why,” Liza fumed. “I haven’t had it on since I left town.”

“Oh,” Jimmy said. “Ah. So you haven’t talked to anybody round here for what—a week?”

“Two,” Liza said.

For some reason, Jimmy seemed to find that funny. But then, he had a strange sense of humor. Liza put it down to his spending too many hours flying high in the sky, or his Jimmy Buffet approach to life. But Perrine seemed to find a laugh in a lot of things most folks wouldn’t consider funny. “You may find some changes,” he said with a smothered chuckle.

Liza laughed. “Come on, Jimmy. Nothing ever changes in Maiden’s Bay. What happened? Did they finally open some stores by the new boardwalk?”

“You’ll see for yourself soon enough,” Jimmy replied. “I wouldn’t want to ruin the surprise.” He looked as if he were about to start laughing, but then smoothed out his face and concentrated on his driving.

As they came up on the exit for Maiden’s Bay, Liza asked if Jimmy could just drop her off downtown. She was friendly with several shopkeepers who wouldn’t mind watching her bags while she bought some supplies and took them home. Then maybe she could borrow the car from her neighbor Mrs. Halvorsen . . .

A tinny rendition of “The Washington Post March” interrupted her mental planning. Liza looked up to find a float done up in red, white, and blue bunting parked next to the war memorial—and blocking the traffic circle around that piece of uninspired statuary.

Liza sighed. She hated the unimaginative tone of political theater in general, and the local nonsense in particular offended her professional publicity sense.

A bunch of people holding clipboards milled around the street and sidewalks, holding out pens to both motorists and passersby. Some of them wore those awful make-believe straw boaters made of polyfoam.

Of course, the hats boasted red-white-and-blue bands, probably emblazoned with the would-be candidate’s name.

Just as she was squinting to make out the print, a voice booming over the loudspeakers distracted her.

“Step right up, voters of Maiden’s Bay!” The pitch sounded better suited for a carnival sideshow than a political rally. “Put your names on our petitions to nominate the town’s next mayor . . . Liza Kelly!”

 

 

 

The world seemed very far away, as if Liza were peering at it through the wrong end of a telescope. A roaring in her ears drowned out both the pitchman’s voice and John Philip Sousa. She also felt her head pounding in time to her elevated heartbeat.

Is this what it feels like to have a stroke?
a detached part of her brain asked with interest.

Then the world snapped back into focus. Liza found herself out of Jimmy’s pickup and stalking up to the float. No, this wasn’t a stroke. It was pure fury. She wished she had something in her hands, a baseball bat—no, a sledgehammer—to bash the bunting off the float, crush those bullhorns, maybe brain a couple of those clipboard-wielding idiots . . .

“Liza! Here you are!” A jubilant voice penetrated the red fog that had rolled in to cloud Liza’s vision. She turned to discover her neighbor Elise Halvorsen bearing down on her.

Mrs. H.’s round, plump face was wreathed in smiles. Liza noticed her neighbor wore her best summer-weight hat, a wispy stray number whose wide, fluttery brim always looked like a pair of wings trying to lift the hat off the woman’s head and into flight. Mrs. H. had decorated her chapeau with one of the red-white-and-blue hatbands. Her hat was smaller than those plastic monstrosities, however, so the slogan read, KELLY FOR MAYO.

Liza found the idea of becoming a condiment so ridiculous that she couldn’t help laughing. “Good to see you, Mrs. H. And how have you been?”

“Busy,” her neighbor replied. “I guess it was two days after you left that Clark came around with a petition. I jumped in at once, helping, and I haven’t looked back since.”

“So this Clark is running things?” Liza said.

Mrs. H. nodded. “Clark Hagen.”

“He must be around here somewhere—this Clark Hagen—right?” Liza tried to keep the tone light, but she could hear a clash like iron in her voice as she repeated the name.

“He should be.” Mrs. H. looked around in perplexity. “I wonder where he got to?”

When Liza scanned the crowd, she noticed that since her arrival—or maybe since Mrs. H. had called out her name so loudly—all the clowns in the fake straw hats had vanished.

Looks like the phonies in the phony hats were the hired professionals,
Liza thought. Now the other folks with clipboards—volunteers like Mrs. H.—looked around uncertainly.

Liza walked up to the front of the float, to the truck that pulled it, only to find the door open and the cab empty. Even the driver had bailed.

Fuming, she turned back to Mrs. Halvorsen. Spotting the red-faced, heavyset guy now standing beside her neighbor didn’t help Liza’s mood. Murph was the ace local reporter for the
Oregon Daily
, the paper where Liza was a columnist. But Murph was a newshound first, a colleague second. As he approached her, pulling out his notebook, he was one hundred percent on the trail of a story.

“How nice to speak to the candidate for a change, instead of some spokesperson,” he said with a facetious grin.

“I’m not a . . .” Liza stopped when she saw Murph’s pen dancing across the page. “Listen, Murph—off the record,” she said. “Can we wait to do this until after I speak with Ava?”

Ava Barnes was Liza’s best friend from childhood as well as the managing editor of the
Oregon Daily
. By convincing Liza to create her sudoku column, she’d also become Liza’s supervisor . . . as well as Murph’s.

“I’m sure the boss would love to chat with you,” Murph said. “Especially since she’s been working on an editorial endorsing Ray Massini for mayor.”

Still giving her that aggravating grin, he nodded, folded up his book, and took off as another familiar figure joined them. Murph was a burly guy, but he seemed downright slender beside the bearlike presence of Sheriff Bert Clements. The sheriff’s khakis might look a bit rumpled, but his style was smooth and placid.

“Afternoon, Liza,” he said with a nod.

“I hope you don’t think this nonsense was my idea.” Liza pointed at the float. “Those idiots left this stupid thing blocking traffic.”

“Wouldn’t want to be seen stifling free speech.” Clements’s voice sounded mild enough. “Especially when it involves the Party,” he continued in an undertone.

A little light began to seep through the darkness of Liza’s anger and puzzlement. Elections in Killamook County had been a one-party affair since before she’d been born. And the Party leadership hadn’t changed in all that time, either.

“John Jacob Pondscum,” Liza growled.

“That’s Pauncecombe to you,” Clements corrected, pronouncing the name to rhyme with “Rome.”

He shook his head. “And I don’t think the orders for this little circus came from that high up the food chain. Often, the essence of politics is deniability. This may be a case of the left hand not knowing what the right is doing.” Clements’s craggy face creased in a grin. “I suppose I should consider myself lucky you didn’t end up running against me.”

His smile faded as a new guy in one of those ubiquitous faux straw hats scrambled onto the float and commandeered the mike. Liza took a step toward him until she realized he had a different hatband—the message read, SMUTZ 4 SHERIFF.

“Ladies and gents,” the newcomer bellowed into the microphone. “We have some more petitions for you. Sign up, get behind the two brooms that will sweep this town clean. Smutz for sheriff, and Kelly for mayor.”

“Who’s this clown?” Liza asked in disbelief.

“Oscar Smutz. He was a . . . political appointee on the force until I persuaded him to leave.”

“So you’ve got a corrupt cop running against you for sheriff?” Liza still couldn’t quite get her head around all this.

“Not exactly corrupt—just a little too cozy with John Jacob and Company. Whenever they needed to put a badge behind some scheme or other, Oscar was their go-to guy. I’m also afraid he never saw a free lunch that he couldn’t eat. Oscar’s the kind of guy who’d walk down Main Street and grab himself an apple off the produce stand without paying for it. An opportunist . . .” He nodded toward the float Smutz had taken over. “As you see.”

He stepped up to the stalled float. Smutz put his hand over the mike. “Hey, Bert.”

“That’s ‘Sheriff Clements’ to you, Oscar,” Clements said.

Hands on his hips, Smutz aimed his big beer gut at the sheriff like some sort of weapon. “At least for the time being. I’m gonna change that. And if you got any problems, you can take them up with Mr. Redbourne at the county elections office.”

Clements glanced back at Liza. “Free speech and all that.” He turned to Smutz again. “But I’m afraid your float is blocking traffic.”

“It’s not my float,” Smutz replied quickly.

“Then maybe you should stop using it.” Clements snapped the trap shut fairly gently. “Respect for private property and stuff like that.”

As Smutz abandoned his perch, Clements headed up to the truck’s open door. Liza looked around for Jimmy Perrine’s pickup. It had disappeared, but Liza’s luggage stood in a neat pile on the curb.

Guess when he saw I didn’t think the joke was too funny, he got out while the getting was good,
she thought.

Liza made the rounds of the milling political volunteers until she caught up with Mrs. Halvorsen. “Did you bring your car?” she asked her neighbor.

“I certainly did.” Mrs. H. made a clucking noise when she noticed Liza’s bags. “Do you need a lift?”

“I certainly do.” Liza recalled the exchange between the sheriff and his new political rival, and the glimmer of a plan began to coalesce. “And I think I’d like to borrow your car for a while, if that’s okay.”

Mrs. H. was only too glad to oblige and had luckily parked her ancient Oldsmobile on the other side of the traffic jam. They managed to load Liza’s luggage and get away before Sheriff Clements got the truck started and moved. It was a fairly short drive to Hackleberry Avenue, and off-loading the luggage and Mrs. H. didn’t take long. Soon Liza set off along a back route to the town of Killamook. She had two destinations. One was the kennel where she’d left her dog, Rusty. The other was the Killamook County Board of Elections.

Driving along Broad Street, Killamook’s main drag, was like taking one of those Perfect Americana theme park rides. Every shutter on every house, each sign on every shop, looked like an escapee from the turn of the century—the last century, not the Y2K era. It actually got a little oppressive, especially since Liza knew how high-handed the town’s Preservation Council could be.

She hoped she wouldn’t encounter the same attitude at the elections office.

The county center was a recent construction and, as such, had been banished from the business district. It was a brick and concrete slab structure hidden by trees and a tall hedge toward the edge of town. No doubt Party stalwarts had provided all that concrete and landscaping at a healthy markup.

Inside, however, Liza caught a whiff of mildew and noticed telltale stains extending down from the dropped ceilings. She couldn’t help recalling one of her mother’s favorite lines—an old Japanese saying, or so she claimed: “The bitterness of poor quality remains long after the sweetness of low price has faded.”