A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Elvis Has Left the Building”

Casey Brown’s blogging received a fair bit more attention once he started talking about Kate Meadows.

It might have had to do with the fact that he approached the case a little differently. He’d never considered himself a conspiracy theorist, but that’s certainly how a lot of his new readers did. Casey leaned into the Malkovich mob theory, but went further than that, all the way to Guantanamo Bay.

It was actually kind of a coincidence. A few years earlier one of Casey’s blogging buddies had drawn his attention to the plight of Val Vinokur, who had been detained in Cuba since 2008. There’d been a movie made about him, although by the time of its release there wasn’t all that much interest in what had become known as Gitmo, based on Vinokur’s journal, which had been heavily redacted. Casey was certainly a movie buff, and he was particularly a fan of the actor who played Vinokur, so it wasn’t that hard to draw him in.

Eventually he obtained a copy of the book published from Vinokur’s journal, which was itself, in order to sell the concept, redacted. Casey found it fascinating, and for the first time could honestly say he found one of the inmates sympathetic. It was one thing to question the legal or moral implications of the place, quite another to look at even one prisoner and see a human being.

The human Casey saw had closer connections home than he would’ve ever expected. Vinokur had been used as an unwitting courier by Whitey Bulger’s crew, which was a process that had tangentially included Malkovich (all that being mere speculation, too), which Casey assumed was something Meadows had stumbled upon, and the reason she had to die.

His readers ate this up, and he became a minor celebrity as a result, which only made Casey nervous. He feared, most of all, that the Boston mafia would take it seriously. He wasn’t even sure he took it seriously. It had seemed so innocent. He’d never had any real readership, and never expected that to change, until it did.

He didn’t sleep well at night.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Down and Out”

Percival Benson had one of those early slots, the wake-up edition of the local news broadcast. It meant his morning started early. It meant his mornings started when everyone else was convinced it was still nighttime.

His broadcasts began at 4. Percival slept until midnight, and started his routine that included things like breakfast, showering, and then showed up at the studio. The reports were already waiting for him, the outlines. It’s easy to assume a television news reporter just reads from a prompter, but the copy is something they write themselves. The best way to achieve a natural voice on camera, after all, is to write the words yourself.

Percival had been reporting on Kate Meadows all week, first as a missing person and then as a murder victim. In his coverage, and the media coverage in general, Bishop and Malkovich had been prominent all along. It was the accepted narrative that a jealous Bishop was responsible, that he had kidnapped Meadows and murdered her sometime when the coverage was just getting underway. Everyone had expected the body. The body, when it finally appeared, was practically anticlimactic. 

Percival tried to remain objective. Bishop’s guilt remained the implied focus. Meadows had been pretty, of course, so keeping the pictures of her in the segments had been enough to build up sympathy, and at the same time imply how monstrous Bishop was to take her away from the world…

That’s what Percival projected. But that’s not what he believed.

In the end it’s a job, and a pretty thankless job. A familiar face, flashes of personality (easiest to get away with so early!), the routine of being on air all the time, and…It can begin to seem a little hollow. He was constantly fighting the thought that his calling had turned into going through the motions.

Maybe that’s why he rejected the narrative. Or maybe he wished he had the chance to dig in a little deeper. But the grind was relentless. The early mornings came whether he slept well or even at all (sometimes), depending on how badly he’d wanted to catch that game last night (anchors are pillars and ambassadors of the community, after all).

But he couldn’t wallow in self-pity. There were always more stories to report.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Close But No Cigar”

Tara Thompson was the detective assigned to the case. Tara was on lone from Portland. There wasn’t much demand for detectives in a small town like Berlin. They hadn’t had one in decades. Back in Portland, which in the minds of its residents was a suburb of Boston, she’d seen a thing or two, things she wished she’d never had to, but this Kate Meadows business, this was something else.

Of the working theories, whether Bishop or Malkovich, or any of the four kidnapping victims from decades earlier, as someone in the local force had been screaming about, madly…Tara just couldn’t see it. The crime scene had been bizarre, staged, exactly as reported, the “ripped blade,” pulled out of some noir novel, theatrical. She would have to cast a wide net, look beyond the area. She supposed it was just as well that she came from away.

One of the first things she did was ask about the FBI, if they were involved, and she was told, for the moment, no. So that was the first wall placed in front of her own theory. She did interview Dixon, Hargraves, Shelton, Salazar. Most of them just wanted to leave what had happened to them in the past. Salazar came off as aggressive, which made Tara suspicious enough to go digging a little deeper. He was the only one of the four who hadn’t been a local, who’d come to Berlin as a consultant for a firm intending to limit the kind of fishing operations that had been the lifeblood of the community for generations, which also accounted for the instinct to put further doubt on him.

But she found him on a fishing boat. He was retired. All he wanted was to cast his bait. 

Tara looked into the neighbor, Matt White, the mother-in-law, Priscilla Foster, who’d done much of the agitating, who kept pointing the fingers, who had been harassing Salazar for years. But Foster was serving time in Warren. The skeletons in the closet were thick. She’d been professing her innocence for years, a bit of a local legend herself, something Mainers talked about in their idle time, but there she was. But someone had killed Kate’s dad, and then someone had killed Kate, and the second one couldn’t have been Foster. And it couldn’t have been Salazar who murdered the patriarch. He hadn’t been in town yet. Or, Tara had to suppose, maybe he’d done it and settled in Berlin to keep a watchful eye.

Killers were clever, after all.

But the evidence was inconclusive. The blade used to commit the murder, Kate had found it herself, and there was still no clear explanation as to how it’d gotten there, and no plausible explanation about why Bishop would’ve gifted it to her. By all accounts he had led a thoroughly unimaginative life. Malkovich, the homebody, full of his own eccentricities, never seemed to have dabbled in things quite of that nature. No, his ties turned out to come out of the Boston mafia scene, and nobody there bothered with gimmicks like that blade. 

No, everyone in town was guilty of conspiracy, all right, just not of the kind that led to whatever had happened to Kate Meadows.

Tara had to confess she found herself stymied.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Beating Around the Bush”

Shirley Stanley was the first cop on the scene, when they found the body.

Of course she’d known about the case. Everyone knew about the case. Most of the country knew about the case by that point. Being on the force, Shirley had been privy to all the efforts that had already been made, back when it was still only a missing persons problem, like all the others: Monica Dixon, Angela Hargraves, Ursula Shelton, Tyler Salazar…

Shirley hadn’t been on the force, then. These were old cases, a lifetime ago. The whole mess was over, just a scary story to tell younger generations, an endless, pointless stream of speculation about who had done it. Certainly not Bishop, not Malkovich. That’s what Shirley used to say, around the office. They were too young.

She felt too young, looking at Kate Meadows’ corpse. She’d seen dead bodies before. Came with the territory, even in a town like Berlin. You can’t be a cop otherwise. She catalogued the evidence. Privately, of course, she speculated. Someone had gone out of their way to stage this scene. But these weren’t things that resulted from swordplay.

And this hadn’t been personal. The first thing you’re supposed to assume is that a victim usually knows the perpetrator. This was too elaborate.

Shirley was too young. Suddenly she found herself reexamining every person she had ever encountered in town, everyone she’d ever heard stories about. This had to be connected, to the disappearances decades back.

So the minute she got back to the station, after logging her report, Shirley went about investigating the kidnap victims. Her supervisor caught wind. She was told to stop. Then she was given a new partner. It didn’t take much for Shirley to become suspicious. She was a cop, after all.

She became convinced she was right. But she had no way to prove it.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “A Fool and His Money…”

Roy Pauley hadn’t been the first to investigate the disappearance of Kate Meadows, and he wouldn’t be the last.

Meadows had vanished in the quaint seaside town of Berlin, Maine. Roy had never even visited Maine. He came from somewhere on the other side of the country. He traveled with a chip on his shoulder. It had been several years since he’d solved a mystery, and even then the results hadn’t exactly been widely accepted, not in the courts, not by the grieving family, the press, and in his darker moments, Roy himself.

But he had to keep pressing onward. The divorce had been ugly and he had bills to pay.

Roy quickly interviewed the two chief suspects, Tommy Bishop and Tom Malkovich, but he found the results unsatisfactory, even by his current standards. Bishop, who had been Meadows’ boyfriend, and Malkovich, who was the last person to see her alive.

But Berlin was a town full of secrets, and Roy quickly learned even those willing to talk were hardly likely to tell him what he needed to know. What exactly was the ripped blade? Where did the hard caffeine Malkovich had used to seduce Meadows come from? How did any of this connect to the kidnappings that had occurred decades earlier?

Roy couldn’t sleep. The noise of the docks was inescapable. He couldn’t concentrate. The Meadows family hounded him. He found them suffocating. He was just a private investigator. The local authorities seemed to have given up. He sifted through reports from a battery of colleagues, some he knew personally, others only by reputation. All inconclusive. 

Then he found the ripped blade. “Ripped,” if that was the appropriate term. The thing had already passed into legend. It had already been one, in this town. The winter lingered, here. None of it made any sense to him.

Roy gave up. Kate Meadows would have to be found by somebody else.

2024 Box Office Top Ten

A somewhat meaningless tradition in my blogging has been reporting on the top box office successes each year, which is what this post is about, to clear up any potential confusion...Results are valid as of today, as reported at The Numbers.

1. Inside Out 2 ($652 million) The surprise huge hit Disney, under its Pixar studio, these days kind of really, really needed.  A somewhat belated sequel to the 2015 original, bagging close to double the haul in this market.  I haven't seen either one.
2. Deadpool & Wolverine ($636 million) Another big Disney hit, for its MCU division, which has also been struggling with recent years to find popular, lucrative material.  This was the first real step at integrating the X-Men franchise previously handled by Fox, technically the third Deadpool, certainly the first R-rated superhero film under its new umbrella, and also Hugh Jackman's return to the role that made him famous after a much-celebrated bow in 2017's Logan.  This was the biggest success for any X-Men film to date.
3. Wicked ($432 million) The first of two films adapting Gregory Maguire's take on The Wizard of Oz, based on the Broadway musical.  Somewhat also belatedly (that's really the story of all three films so far listed) on the heels of the similar Frozen.
4. Moana 2 ($404 million) Reportedly cobbled together from a previous incarnation as a TV series.  Actually, Disney did quite well in 2024, all considered.
5. Despicable Me 4 ($361 million) Actually the sixth in the franchise, after three previous under this title and two under Minions.
6. Beetlejuice Beetlejuice ($294 million) A very belated sequel!  The first was released way back in 1988.  Like Harrison Ford, Michael Keaton's been enjoying revisiting old roles (including Batman in The Flash) recently.  The first didn't quite make this kind of money, although it finished in the top ten for its year, too.
7. Dune: Part Two ($282 million) Denis Villeneuve successfully launched a film series on a book that had previously produced a somewhat notorious dud of an adaptation back in 1984.
8. Twisters ($267 million) I'm gonna go ahead and declare this the closest to an original film the top ten enjoyed this year.  Technically related to the 1996 film Twister, it features new characters in what is essentially a remake, and serves as a vehicle for budding new star Glen Powell.  
9. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire ($196 million)  Dating back a decade to the release of this franchise's Godzilla, this is somehow the fifth in the series.  
10. Kung Fu Panda 4 ($193 million) Yeah, the caveat for Twisters is really an attempt to rationalize the fact that every single movie this year is part of a series.  That's just how it is these days.  For what it's worth, the fifteenth and sixteenth entries are either merely based on a book (It Ends With Us) or...also based on a book (The Wild Robot).  But the twenty-first, IF, second to last on the list to score at least a hundred million, is entirely original!

Here's, for slight comparison, what it looked like at the global box office:

1. Inside Out ($1.6 billion)
2. Deadpool & Wolverine ($1.3 billion)
3. Moana 2 ($1 billion)
4. Despicable Me 4 ($971 million)
5. Wicked ($743 million)
6. Mufasa: The Lion King ($719 million) The first of two different entrants, and another win for Disney.
7. Dune: Part Two ($714 million)
8. Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire ($572 million) 
9. Kung Fu Panda 4 ($547 million)
10. Sonic the Hedgehog 3 ($491 million) And here's the other big difference.  If you're ever confused as to why some movies that did okay here in the States don't seem to be popular online, or movies that did well internationally but poorly here have bad reputations, or simply did bad everywhere...That's just how things are.  Reputations are built on box office.  The phenomenon of cult classics rehabilitate movies that made small amounts of money (or none).  If you're wondering, the eleventh entry on this list is from China, which is also why I started using The Numbers rather than Box Office Mojo, which decided a few years back to ignore Chinese numbers.  The country also nabbed thirteenth and fourteenth

As always, I post this here these days mostly as a window into my interests.  I love movies.

A Most Excellent Fancy released

https://a.co/d/11SR5Fz

A Most Excellent Fancy is the last of my Kindle Vella projects, and the latest novella now available in paperback. It’s a farce, ultimately, but a tragedy loosely based on a Shakespearean model, with one chapter in verse. This edition incorporates as footnotes the original notes Vella always encouraged authors to include, mostly detailing the famous Shakespeare phrases used as chapter titles. This is also the first time in fiction I use Mount Rushmore as a backdrop, though it shouldn’t be the last. I hugely valued Kindle Vella as a platform, its ability to draw out material I would likely have never written without it.