A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Zip It”

Perry Shepherd had been the first of the three private investigators hired by Ford to investigate the Meadows case. The reason was quite simple: Shepherd’s roots in the Berlin police department, in these matters, ran deepest of all. He’d been Harmony Wright’s senior partner. He was retired now. He’d been on the force when the original kidnappings occurred, when Foster was arrested and convicted. His were the sins that started them all.

For these reasons, Shepherd initially appeared as if he wasn’t going to accomplish anything at all. That was why Pawley was hired. Ford believed in Shepherd, but Shepherd himself considered it Ford forcing a sense of redemption Shepherd himself didn’t find necessary. He didn’t feel the need to defend his work. This had the effect of provoking a defensive attitude. He resented Ford, and let him know under no uncertain terms.

The days turned into weeks turned into months. He was being paid regardless. Every week Ford would show up at his door with an envelope. Never asked him a single question. Shepherd interpreted the look he saw in Ford’s face how he wanted. Eventually he stopped looking. Ford showed up every week anyway.

It was an idle moment fiddling on that “smart phone” his niece had bought for him after an incident where his Chevy had broken down and he hadn’t had his phone on him, his cheap, data plan phone that supplemented the landline he still used, the cellphone he never used, wasting time on Facebook, when he came across someone sharing Kate Meadows’ last post.

The post was entirely innocuous. If it hadn’t been her last no one would have noticed or cared. The fact is, as far as he could tell, and Shepherd was certainly no expert, unless you expressed something controversial or incriminating, no one cared what you told about yourself, your place in the world, especially if you weren’t trying to ingratiate yourself to some group identity. And that had been Kate’s one and only sin, the courage to drown without a lifeline. Shepherd went down the rabbit hole. He spent hours sifting through all her posts. Neither Bishop nor Malkovich had ever interacted with her material. She did post videos and photos of her relationship with Bishop, which was as far as Shepherd could tell why the media coverage had obsessed over him. An anonymous rascal, though, whom he suspected but couldn’t prove to be White, had constantly harassed her. She had chosen to disengage as much as possible. It hadn’t seemed to help.

That last post was about her dog. She’d been worried. She never had the chance to bring it to the vet. Shepherd made a note to warn Bradley about that.

That was also when he started sharing his thoughts, first with the dog walker, then Hodgson, then Gene Reid. They all agreed that Matt White was the likeliest suspect. It was Shepherd, though, who convinced Ford that charges should be pressed. The resulting trial couldn’t possibly be the media circus that had already been made out of the case. White was convicted, sentenced, and ended up in the same facility as Priscilla Foster.

That was when Shepherd made his first visit. He brought his new phone with him. He shared with Foster Kate’s Facebook posts. It was Foster who interpreted all the ones Kate had written about her, always worded from oblique angles, that Shepherd had overlooked. Foster quietly asked him to leave, then. Later, he thought he understood why.

Late at night he scrolled through Kate’s timeline. He’d never known her when she was alive. She was too young to register, when Foster’s problems occurred. That’s what he’d told himself, then. The next day, he waited patiently for the Andromeda & Ash to open. Kay Poole had been given the sword, after its release from the evidence locker. He asked to see it. 

When he showed up at the Hawkeye, Ford was still there. They ended up talking about Kate for hours. 

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “You Can’t Teach An Old Dog New Tricks”

After Harmony Wright left the force, Gene Reid was assigned as Shirley Stanley’s new partner.

Gene had only recently completed his training, and there were plenty of doubts about him. He seemed to lack confidence, and freely shared his concerns about joining the department in the shadow of the Kate Meadows case. Patrol in a small town like Berlin usually meant planting inside a cruiser and waiting for something to happen, usually minor traffic violations, the common stock of speeding, which society had given up on as a vice, had turned it into a virtue, which meant issuing actual tickets for couldn’t just be done because of what a radar said.

This gave those inside the cruiser plenty of time to think, waiting on nothing. If anything Gene was an overthinker, which was what Shirley had spent a lot of her time complaining about. She’d already had her fill of the Meadows case. Like most people she’d viewed Harmony’s departure as a closing of the book. The town positively crawled with folks trying to prove otherwise, always buzzing the station, just a regular swarm of nuisance, but then, for a town used to being ignored all the attention was an embarrassment on multiple levels, and that was certainly going to cause a backlash.

Gene persisted. As the weeks advanced into months, he settled in. Shirley developed a kind of affection for him, began to grasp his thought process. It didn’t change how she felt about the Meadows case, but she was at least willing to humor him. There was plenty of time to kill, after all.

She listened as he talked about Matt White, at how he’d been overlooked, taken at face value, at how he had blatantly lied to everyone, at how no one had looked deeper into his claims. Shirley felt insulted, but then Gene was hardly the only one who had been talking about Matt White. The dog sitter, the detective missing a leg, Perry Shepherd.

In fiction it’s common to solve crimes to a thoroughly satisfactory degree. In the real world there’s always doubt. The infuriating part is that even when there seems to be absolutely no doubt it’s still difficult to prove. That’s what Shirley kept trying to argue with Gene. But Gene persisted.

Gene went over everything all over again. He talked to Bradley, to Hodgson, to Shepherd, to Rios, to Kay Poole. He even went up to visit Priscilla Foster. Ford, who had hired all the private investigators, one after the other, privately admitted he was ashamed at how all this had played out. He consulted Tara Thompson, the detective, who had also included White in her list of suspects, but who had been dissuaded from pursuing the case, in the end, had discovered why the FBI wasn’t involved, why Ford felt so beleaguered, and it was a matter of innocence.

The wrong kind of innocence. White was distantly connected to the right kind of people. In different times, different ages, different contexts, the right kind of people look very different, but in the final analysis they tend to be untouchable. White himself wasn’t in their number, but the fact of his association had placed him under their graces. Not everything that had happened, here, was a result of their meddling, but enough. Just enough. Tyler Salazar, that elusive infiltrator, had been from their number, a bastard outcast, a failed spoiled wreck of a fortunate son, all those years ago, of the number who in the days of the Nazis would have done everything to downplay what Nazis actually were, but in later days have pretended there was no way to know how awful Nazis were.

If only.

Gene pushed his way through. He found the blood evidence that had been hiding in plain sight, in Matt White’s car, down in Casco Bay, the car White had reported as stolen before Meadows had gone missing, had proven beyond a shadow of a doubt how premeditated the whole bloody affair had been, how White had slipped, had admitted it to the conspiracy theorist Dale Salvage, finally, how Salvage hadn’t thought much at the time, had admitted it to Gene, how Wilmut Snee, when asked again, had admitted to seeing White’s Mitsubishi in twilight hours after the disappearance, corroborated by Emily Bowman, corroborated by Cyril Fernandez, now cooperating on a plea bargain…

All this didn’t elevate Gene’s standing in the department. He didn’t grow in confidence so much as become exasperated, and as a rule it’s really not a good thing to question the system. No one learned anything, learning the truth of what had happened to Kate Meadows, and why it had been so difficult to discover. 

Gene settled into a frustrating life. He’d had practice. In this instance, practice didn’t make perfect.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “X Marks the Spot”

Harmony Wright poisoned much of the ground in the Kate Meadows case very early on. She was Shirley Stanley’s original partner. She was one of the longest serving cops in Berlin. She should’ve known better. But she’d simply been a bad cop her whole career. 

She ignored most of what was discovered by later investigations. She didn’t have the first clue how the sword had entered the picture, that it had been in the family for generations. She heard that it had been in the pawn shop, and that was enough. That was how it entered the record, and that’s how it stayed.

She sketched out Kate’s relationship with Tommy Bishop and Tom Malkovich. She knew what everyone always assumes, that the simplest, easiest story is usually the right one. Everyone in town already knew, had already been talking about Bishop, about Malkovich, and it was Harmony who entered that into the record, too. Shirley Stanley had no idea how many preconceived notions she was guided along. She trusted Harmony. Why wouldn’t she?

All this was in the earliest days. It was Harmony who led the investigation into the disappearance, who was the point of contact when the nation caught wind of the missing persons case, when Kate’s face was plastered all over the news and people were sympathetic mostly because she was an attractive young woman, and Bishop just came off as sketchy, and Malkovich, creepy. Love triangle. One of the oldest stories in the book, right?

Harmony had been there for the other disappearances. She’d covered the Priscilla Foster case. She was the expert. Everyone trusted her.

When Kate turned up dead and it was officially ruled a tragedy, a murder, no one stopped to wonder why it was Harmony hadn’t been able to prevent it. Except that she hadn’t accounted for the timeline of events, she hadn’t bothered to do much more than sketch what anyone could’ve sketched. 

Except Shirley Stanley. It was Shirley who finally confronted Harmony. They’d had disagreements, here and there, all along, really, and Harmony had put them down to Shirley’s inexperience. Harmony had a temper, and she tended to handle all problems the same way, by getting mad and elevating the situation. But then, she worked in a small town like Berlin. She’d always been able to hide. Shirley had always been told she was the problem. 

When the questions from other investigations started filtering their way into the station, Harmony was asked to step down. It was handled like an early retirement. She was allowed to keep her dignity.

The damage, though, had already been done. Malkovich, particularly, had already been in one holding cell or facility for months, for close to a year, had sat in various courtrooms, had been demonized around the country. Bishop had lost his job, had been ostracized by his family, and was in fact now homeless. These are things that don’t show up in the news. He was now an addict. 

And Harmony Wright sat comfortably at home. She still thought she was right. And not one person affected by her decisions ever bothered her thoughts. She was probably the one person in the country who didn’t even know what Kate Meadows looked like.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: "What Am I, Chopped Liver?"

Luke Hodgson was another of the private investigators who found themselves drawn to the case.

Luke's path had been particularly circuitous.  In another lifetime he'd been a military chaplain.  In another lifetime he'd had both his legs intact.  That was no longer the case.

These days Luke hobbled about on a leg and a prosthetic that bothered him the more he put weight on it, whenever he pushed himself on his rounds.  He was another visitor from Portland, and although he normally did travel in his beat-up Datsun, a gift from his old man from yet another lifetime, lately he'd also been making due with the young woman who'd recently signed on to work at his office as an intern, Monica, a whole saga itself that would require more attention than some might be willing to lend it, but suffice it to say, she routinely ended up doing the driving for both of them, in her equally fashionable station wagon.  Once in Berlin, though, he found himself putting pressure on the stump as he hobbled about town.

Wendy Webster had hired Luke, although he'd immediately dismissed her as a meddler just looking to make a name for herself.  No, of far greater interest was Matt White, over whom he quickly set about a surveillance schedule with Monica, the dull, ordinary work of the trade that often got overlooked.  

Sitting in the car, he had plenty of time to think.  The Meadows case was a mess.  Too many had already jumped to all the wrong conclusions, all the seemingly obvious ones, and the narrative had solidified around Bishop and Malkovich over a lot of nonsense Luke had found easy to dismiss.  There were a few on the right track, though, as he looked over his notes.  The dog sitter, for one, of all people, one of the town's cops, even his own colleague, his sometime rival Perry Shepherd.  Roy, though, had been completely wrong, as always.

The business concerning the sword, though, that had certainly interested Luke.  His interviews with Kay Poole had been particularly informative.  His stump left Luke continually dwelling on his own war experiences.  He wasn't so crass as to compare what he'd gone through to the Holocaust, although his personality would've certainly suggested so to many of the citizens he'd talked to.  No, Luke had certainly not ingratiated himself in Berlin...

As always, he pressed forward anyway.  He knew White was his man.  Monica slipped into the passenger seat, holding, depressingly, another paper cup of coffee from that diner, rather than a Guinness.  She asked him for updates.  There weren't any.  White was predictably elusive.  That's what they'd said about Malkovich, but they'd been wrong.  The relationship Malkovich had actually had with Meadows versus the one White had clearly wanted, which was obvious to anyone paying attention to what he said, when he bothered agreeing to talk at all...

There was bound to be a break in the case.  At least Luke could rest easy in the knowledge he wasn't completely alone this time.  

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Vicious Circle”

Gerald Ford was not that Gerald Ford. He could have been. George Bush had a home in Kennebunkport, after all. But Gerald Ford was unrelated to the Gerald Ford who had been president.

He was, however a town councilman.

He often wondered if that was partly a result of his name, though. Actually, most of the time he assumed it was entirely because of the name. George Bush in Kennebunkport and all. 

Be that as it may, Gerald still had to do the job, whether or not he’d gotten it because of his name. To be fair, he’d also gotten it because his family had lived in Berlin for generations, their tombs could be found in the cemetery with dates as far back as the 1700s, when there was little question that the main occupation of anyone living here was maritime. In the Fords case, on a merchant basis. No one in the Maine territories at that time was involved in the Boston business, but the Ford family loved to tell guests that they had been close associates of Thomas Hancock.

It was also true that when someone of the younger generations asked if he was that Gerald Ford, he didn’t exactly go out of his way to dissuade them.

At any rate, that was why he spent a great deal of time listening to angry Berlin citizens at town meetings asking him what he was going to do about Kate Meadows, what he was going to do about Shirley Stanley, about Harmony Wright. Even when he was just sitting down for his morning coffee at the Hawkeye. Especially when he was sitting down for his morning coffee. He’d previously enjoyed a leisurely approach to his diner visits. Shandy refilled his mug at minimum three times. Used to, anyway. It was getting to where Gerald could hardly wait to leave before the first had reached the bottom.

Now whenever anyone asked about Tara Thompson from over in Portland, when the FBI was going to get involved, Gerald dreaded the attention. He started to hear comments he’d never previously experienced, references to Chevy Chase, to Richard Nixon. Especially after declaring the town’s official stance was that Tom Malkovich needed to be left alone.

This is to say, Gerald Ford started to feel cursed for the first time in his life.

A to Z Challenge 2025 -The Ripped Blade: “Up in Arms”

Barnaby Watts happened to be a resident of Berlin, and he happened to be a nationwide bestselling author, who wrote mysteries. This Kate Meadows business fell into his lap. 

Now, the way he ended up forming his conclusions was very much the orthodox view of the murder, because he didn’t have all that much imagination, all considered. Authors are less imaginative than you might think. They’re rewarded more for how they write than what they write, which, the more expected, the better. So he pinned the blame on Tom Malkovich, because that’s what Shirley Stanley’s first partner, Harmony Wright, did. Based on faulty evidence. He codified the existing narrative.

Barnaby didn’t need to worry too much about that. Guilt is relative. Red herrings are more important in these affairs, misdirection. Once a suspect is dismissed they’re conveniently absolved and the plot moves ever onward to the true culprit. Everyone just agrees that the tidy conclusions reached are the only ones possible.

Except in the real world. Barnaby, conveniently, didn’t live in the real world. He’d comfortably settled into his niche, churned out as many predictably profitable, comforting affirmations of the system working as his publishers welcomed, a regular factory system, often blended with cowriters from his admittedly extensive outlines. He always wrote his Surge Light books himself. Those were his babies. Everything else was fair game. He’d opted for collaboration with the Kate Meadows book. He still got all the credit.

He didn’t care that Stanley wigged out, that serious doubt welcomed Wright’s findings. He fancied himself something of a detective himself. He made the rounds. This was his home ground, after all. They would all be impressed. He was an elder statesman of the community. That would make it all easier.

Barnaby was pleased with the results. He always was.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Throw in the Towel”

If Cyril Fernandez had been much aware of or concerned about toxicology his theory would’ve been immediately disqualified by Daniel Rios’s autopsy. As it was, he wasn’t. He operated in his own world, his own circles. Cyril was a drug dealer.

He was convinced Kate Meadows was an addict. He’d never personally sold anything to Kate. He didn’t live in Berlin; he worked out of Portland. But he knew people. He heard things. He thought, like a lot of people, that he could put two and two together. He’d certainly heard the Boston mafia rumors, the supposed true history of Tom Malkovich. In Cyril’s version it was Malkovich who was Kate’s dealer.

Obviously something had gone wrong. Either Kate had fallen behind or gotten in too deep. She must’ve spiraled. That was pretty common, in these circles. He imagined her strung out. He pictured Malkovich actually trying to help her. Hey, the saying goes everyone’s a hero in their own stories, right? People in Cyril’s business don’t exactly think they’re ruining lives. They think they’re helping. That’s the whole point, right?

To Cyril, the facts fit the argument. Everyone said she’d been kidnapped, but all that could really be determined was that she’d gone missing. She’d had to lay low. Again, not so unusual in these circumstances. And she just hadn’t been able to get out from under. These things happened.

He felt bad about it. He pitied her. He wasn’t heartless. Saying that he also knew there were plenty more where she came from, that was just stating the obvious. There were always others. There was always more. The real problem with an expanded population was that it made jobs like his an increasingly established, invisible level of society. Easy to ignore, normalize. The fear vanishes.

And someone like Kate, whom the media portrayed in such wholesome terms (of course), would always turn out to be the victim. That’s why Cyril lamented her. As far as he could tell, if things had been just a little different for her, if she’d felt just a little less desperate, this would’ve never happened to her. She might’ve simply been another homeless bum. Instead of an addict. The two hadn’t always gone so hand-in-hand. 

Well. Sometimes you just throw in the towel. That’s what happened, here. All the way around. 

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Short End of the Stick”

Kay Poole was the proprietor of Andromeda & Ash, which had occupied its spot on Berlin’s Main Street for so long, mostly it was tourists who even still noticed it was there. In Maine, tourism is big business, so that was okay. Kay was an antiques dealer.

That meant she’d received plenty of business from Kate’s family over the years. That also meant she was the only person in town who knew anything about the so-called “ripped blade,” the sword Kate’s family had leveraged over the years to get themselves out of tight spots.

As far as Kay was concerned, the sword was nothing but a curse. Several lifetimes ago, it had belonged to a Nazi.

In fact, she knew the real reason Tyler Salazar and his friends had been so obsessed with Kate’s family, why Priscilla Foster had fought so bitterly against them. Salazar had been a relic hunter, had tried everything to obtain that sword, and had been stymied at every turn by Foster. And in turn, by Kay, which was why she hadn’t had a decent night’s sleep in decades.

Kate’s maternal grandfather had returned from the war a deeply troubled man, which on the surface hadn’t seemed so unreasonable. It was years before he spoke a word about his experiences, years before anyone knew of the sword’s existence. It was Salazar who proved to be the tipping point. He’d been tracking the sword. This was the first time Kay saw it. It first crossed the threshold of Andromeda & Ash for safekeeping. No money changed hands that day. Kate’s grandfather trembled. Kay put it in her vault.

A few days later he returned, looking anxious. Kay closed shop and walked silently with him to the diner. She watched as his coffee cooled in front of him. He gulped it down, suddenly, as if time were about to expire and he would forever lose his chance for confession.

Then he told her his story.

He hadn’t shot a single soul, until he came across the soldier, alone, in a forest surrounded by baggage. Kate’s grandfather (the man’s name was Eugene, but Kay didn’t like to put a name to the face, preferred to honor his sacrifices) was confused. Was the man a defector? Had he been caught running away? Had he gotten this far only to give up? 

He said he could smell the camp, knew what must be happening in there without ever laying eyes on it. He said there could be no mistake. Anyone in the vicinity would know. No one had done anything about it.

The soldier began to tell his own story. There had been a girl. She’d clutched this baggage. She’d been privileged. She could sing. She’d been kept for their amusement. But she’d been nothing, before. She’d been given this baggage by someone who’d also been allowed privileges. Who was gone now. And so was the girl.

The soldier had claimed the baggage. Within was nothing special, really. All the valuable things were gone, had been gone a long time. Except the sword. Clearly they had thought they could hide it. But nothing remained hidden from them. Eventually, everything was found. 

He’d tried to run, when he found it. He said he’d felt strange, when he saw it for the first time. He couldn’t explain. All he knew was that he had to run. To keep it for himself. But eventually he’d stopped. He said no one had tried to stop him. He’d done it himself.

Kate’s grandfather found him like that. Saw him produce the sword. It wasn’t worth all that much. It was damaged even then. Ugly. Why would anyone treasure that? A story that had disappeared several deaths ago. Vanished into history.

Kate’s grandfather shot him, then. Put a stream of rounds into him. He said the soldier positively exploded.

And Kate’s grandfather ran, too. Reported back to his unit. He didn’t try to hide the sword. His buddies accepted it as just another memento of the war. They all had something.

He was still alive, when Salazar came to Berlin. But he was an invalid. He died soon after Priscilla Foster was impregnated. 

Kay kept these secrets. No one cared. They were irrelevant to the murder. And in their way, explained it.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Raining Cats and Dogs”

Daniel Rios, the medical examiner, determined that the murderer was left-handed, and that automatically disqualified Tommy Bishop and Tom Malkovich, but left the door open for Matt White, among other potential suspects, not that White was under suspicion, at least until Rios, Belinda Bradley, and Luke Hodgson, Gene Reid, and Perry Shepherd entered the scene. 

Rios was chronologically the earliest to finger White in the murder of Kate Meadows. Normally medical examiners aren’t investigators, but then, neither are writers of fiction, much less parish priests, although in this particular case the latter wouldn’t be involved, at least not officially; Hodgson had resigned years earlier. 

Rios, however, found himself compelled, not so much because the case had become so high profile, but that he found himself so appalled by what had happened to Meadows. He’d never seen anything like it in his twenty years in Cumberland County.

He counted twenty slash wounds, in fact. She’d been raped, beforehand, beaten savagely. Starved. The days accounting for the kidnapping had been brutal. This had been, as these tend to go, personal. This hadn’t been a stranger. That was why Rios listened to Priscilla Foster. But Tyler Salazar was no southpaw. 

He considered whether Bishop or Malkovich might’ve thrown off suspicion, hidden a secret ambidextrous talent, and in his interviews with them devised clever methods to catch them out. With Bishop he outright had the man juggle condiments at the diner. With Malkovich, whom he’d learned had played in a bambino league as a boy, Rios poured over old newspaper clippings in the Berlin Library. He discovered Malkovich had in fact grown up in town before moving away, then returning. Most townsfolk had considered him a traitor. But he could only write with his right hand. That’s as close as Rios could confirm.

Rios, and his son (Rios was aging; part of his interest might simply have been that he found time finally catching up with him), had to wait until Reid appeared on the scene. They compared notes with Bradley, the eccentric dog walker. 

They waited to see if justice would prevail.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Quality Time”

Belinda Bradley was a dog sitter.

She walked dogs for a living. Kate Meadows had had a dog, a cocker spaniel named Anchorage, colored white and brown, shaggy, utterly adored by her owner, and by Belinda, whose daily routes about Berlin took her into Kate’s neighborhood regularly, until the day Kate finally asked if she might walk Anchorage, too, just around the block, alone, if she could, not with the glut of other dogs.

Kate always did take things slow. Belinda was walking Anchorage daily for three months before Kate thought to exchange more than passing pleasantries with her, not because she was rude, but because she was shy. Belinda found out a lot about her, that day. She’d seen Tommy about. She’d even seen Kate trotting away from Tom’s home, flustered, believing herself caught, in some kind of scandal. Belinda would never have been the kind to judge.

She was always, personally, a little more worried about Matt White, who certainly was. It was in the way he looked at Kate, through the window. Oh, he certainly did judge her.

The day Kate went missing, it was while Belinda was walking the dog. They waited at the door, patiently, Belinda knocking politely, Anchorage starting to whine, Belinda tutting at him. No answer. Very curiously indeed, too, no Matt White at his window. He always seemed to be at his window, when Kate was to be glimpsed.

She couldn’t very well leave the dog. She broke her vow for the first time, taking Anchorage along as she completed that day’s rounds. She didn’t have much choice. She took the dog home with her after her duties were done, they’d checked again, and still no Kate, and no Matt White.

On the evening news Belinda heard about the disappearance for the first time. She supposed she was going to have to keep Anchorage, for a while. She found something for the dog to eat, scraps hidden away in the refrigerator she’d thought might molder for all the interest she’d previously had in them. The dog didn’t seem to mind. She set out a bowl with water.

That night the dog hopped into her bed before she could come up with a different plan, and was still there the next morning. She rang the police station on her old landline. She wouldn’t have a mobile phone for years, much less an interest in using one. She explained the situation. Got brushed off. They said they had bigger concerns than a dog.

Belinda settled in to life with Anchorage. She walked her routes. The dog didn’t mind the added company. She noticed Matt White’s reappearance, later. After the reports that the kidnapping had become a murder investigation.

For the first time she knocked at his door. She had a conversation with him. She exchanged words with Shirley Stanley. Stanley didn’t give her the time of day. Matt White, of course, denied everything.

But as far as Belinda was concerned, she had her man. She just needed to prove it. When she was doing the real snoop work, she had to leave Anchorage at her house. She didn’t own any dogs herself. She’d grown up with them. She walked them. That had always been enough. She didn’t feel comfortable tying the dog up in the yard. But she was fearful of what would become of her house with the dog in it unsupervised.

Every time she returned, still convinced of her premise, Belinda found Anchorage beating the floor happily with his tail. She told him what a good boy he was. She started carrying treats on her person, which she had certainly never done before. Can’t have that, walking dogs for a living.

Matt White slipped. Then it was just a matter of the police catching up with her. Agreeing to the obvious narrative. She practiced her speech in the bathroom mirror. Anchorage thumped his tail along with her.

She started to dread the idea of parting with him.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Poke Fun At”

Priscilla Foster had become the butt of the joke a long time ago. There are people out there who feel as if the entire world conspires against them. Most of them are simply delusional, some literally mentally impaired in some way. Priscilla had been given the evidence basically her whole life.

The man who became known as Tyler Salazar, one of the kidnapping victims from two decades earlier, the same point at which her son had been murdered, the ugly custody battle that had forever labeled her the mother-in-law, the first time anyone associated her with Kate Meadows, the grandchild who would end up herself murdered…

No one listened to Priscilla about Salazar. That was because no one knew who Salazar really was. A conman, who had first come to Berlin in another of his many scams. Who had seduced her mother. Who was in fact her biological father. 

In those days such things were covered up. No one wanted the scandal. No one could’ve known, then, how these things would play out. So much worse. So much infinitely worse.

When Salazar ended up dead, years later, she’d known. He’d killed her son. Everyone would assume she’d killed Salazar. No one ever bothered to find out the truth. The truth doesn’t matter. It’s always the best story. She didn’t know much about what had happened, between Salazar, Dixon, Hargraves, Shelton. Some kind of cult, maybe. Partners in crime, at any rate. Ended badly. Continued in that direction until it got worse. She didn’t care which one had done it, had killed Salazar. Maybe some other pathetic associate. But no one else did, either. They assumed it was her. She’d made too much fuss already. 

So they locked her up. Put on a sham trial. In those days, so much easier. Not as much burden of evidence. Proof by way of hearsay. 

And now, all these years later, she heard…everything. There was actual support for her. Not everyone bought into the narrative. Easier to do that, when you were removed from the chatter in the community. Folks from around the state, who had never stepped foot in Berlin, they looked at the evidence and didn’t see how Priscilla fit in it. But they had no authority. And the authorities didn’t care.

Kate’s mother died of cancer. But she died of a broken heart. She’d never believed what they said about Priscilla. They’d had a good relationship. The custody battle another drama created by the system, by lawyers. But all of it had taken a toll on Kate, and no one had been paying attention. Priscilla saw, but she was powerless. Behind prison bars. 

And then it happened again. She blamed Salazar even though it was irrational. But she was beyond reason. That’s what the life she’d been given will do to you.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Off One’s Base”

Wilmut Snee had lived all his life in Berlin, and came from stock that could say the same for more than a century behind him, his father, his grandfather, and at least his great-grandfather…He was no genealogist, but he knew this mostly since he lived in the same house the family had occupied for generations, had built themselves. This is to say, his roots ran deep in this town.

He knew all about the Meadows business. It had become the talk of the diner he visited every morning. He sipped at his coffee and they all sat about, saying much the same thing about it, each day, the way these things tend to go. What a sordid affair. None of them had been too shocked about it. Meadows and her whole family had lived such desperate lives already, had been the subject of gossip since before Kate Meadows had ever been born. The poor girl had always been doomed to a bad end. Magnets for trouble. 

Truth was, Wilmut might’ve helped prevent all this, years ago, if only he’d had the courage. Tommy Bishop’s dad had worked under him at the bait shop for years, until the day he’d had to be fired. Nothing could be proven, and maybe it was just a case of looking for a scapegoat, but it had fallen to Tommy’s old man, and that had been the start of its own desperate spiral, had set Tommy on the wrong foot before he was even born, destined to be the source of cautious advice the likes of Kate would just ignore. 

No, Wilmut didn’t know Tommy Bishop himself, but he knew the type, and as these things tend to go, he assumed he knew the man, and never so much as bothered to find out if there was a difference. That’s how these things go.

Of course he’d killed Kate. Everyone knew that. Anyone who said any different was crazy. That’s what they said at the diner. 

Wilmut was content in such conclusions. 

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “No Ifs, Ands, or Buts”

Haley Hewitt was the director chosen for the film. Haley had broken through with indy films set in Maine. She herself was from Maine, from Westbrook, which for all intents and purposes is a part of the Portland community, but far enough away that Haley could claim her independence, which she’d very much enjoyed for much of her life, up to and including her first films, which made the rounds of the festival circuits, and so were well-known by critics but otherwise unknown by the general public, until she could start casting name actors. Then she was recruited by Disney to helm the live action version of The Sword in the Stone, but that was before the studio had really gotten into the swing of the idea, and there had already been enough King Arthur flicks for a generation apathetic to the idea in the first place, so Haley’s career necessarily came full circle…

She hadn’t followed the Kate Meadows story, too busy in her film work and community to have noticed, but the very minute the announcement had been made, Haley became inundated with requests for her opinion. She opted to be professional. She talked about the production, about the actor she was working with again who’d appeared in a few of those early films. She talked about how happy she was with how things were coming together.

Truthfully, she really didn’t have a take on it. She didn’t care. She liked the script. She’d read the book. And that was it. When the film was released, she continued with all her standard points on the press tour, at the premiere. She recorded a commentary track for the DVD, and anyone who had heard her talk about it before heard much the same thing. She liked the work that had been done. She particularly liked the cinematography, which she always felt never got near the amount of attention it should.

In short, Haley didn’t care about Kate Meadows. The movie made a decent amount at the box office. It allowed her to keep working. That was all.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Mountain Out of a Molehill”

Jacqueline Malcolm had written Oscar-winning screenplays. Past tense, as it had, admittedly, been a while. A decade or so, really. Early in the millennium, sure, but the century was no longer quite so young. It was 2013, and the world no longer belonged to the likes of Jacqueline.

She took Marty’s call. She would’ve anyway, of course, but in her desperation, and knowing Marty, which everyone in Tinseltown did, she knew exactly what he was thinking, and in the seconds it took to hear his voice, after she picked up, she had already been drafting a script in her head. She listened as he explained his vision, but she could already see hers.

She didn’t much care about Kate Meadows. Provincial. If someone had written a novel, and some actress, or Oprah, had recommended it in their book club, it would’ve been a different story, of course. That was a win for the culture. Jacqueline kept his finger on the pulse. Important, in this business. “Important to the culture” was the wave of the future, especially if Hollywood said so.

She didn’t like Marty’s take, but there was no way she was going to tell him that. She worked on two separate drafts, one that followed his ideas, and the other that followed hers.

Jacqueline’s story revolved around the sword. She had no idea why. She called it the ripped blade, exactly as the media had it, exactly as, or so she’d heard, some mystery writer had called theirs. Competitor. She didn’t worry about it. Marty could iron out the details.

Why it was her subject was very much original to Jacqueline. Somewhere she’d read about Ursula Shelton having once been in possession of the sword. In Jacqueline’s mind the thing was cursed. Kate Meadows was cursed. She had a private investigator straight out of classic film noir pursuing it. 

In the end, like The Maltese Falcon, the sword is found, but it offers no real answers. Buried, in this instance, in Kate’s heart (creative license). But a great visual. The stuff dreams are made of, you might say…

But she couldn’t. That one had already been used, alas.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Lickety Split”

Marty Nichols really wanted the movie called Lickety Split. A lot of people tried arguing such a decision would be in incredibly poor taste. Marty didn’t particularly care. He was a movie producer. He was used to getting it his own way.

Smaller production companies, from in-state, had tried to claim the rights. Marty scoffed at the very idea. This was a national story, now. People all over the country had been riveted to news broadcasts, to their phones, concerning poor Kate Meadows. She’d filled endless copy in the tabloids, in the weekly magazines, in the papers, where her name hadn’t left the top of the front page since it first appeared, at least in the local ones.

In short, Kate had become a household name. License to print money. Cable networks had already filmed shitty TV movies, several streaming services. 

Marty had a vision. In recent decades the most reliable source of box office returns had been massive, corporate-owned IPs. Bookstores had shelves filled with Kate Meadows books, too, eventually. That one author who seemed to have a new book cowritten every week just released. He had one, too. Marty saw Kate as a commodity, like anything else. He knew at least one young actress with just the right amount of sex appeal to sell the tragedy in all the right ways, young actors maybe not so much with name recognition but talent enough to seduce poor Kate in celluloid. 

He didn’t have an opinion of what’d happened. He didn’t care. He saw it as a timeless, classic piece of Americana, another dream lost in a life cut too short. Out in the wilderness. Like all the best stories.

In his mind, Marty saw Bishop hopping aboard his fishing boat and setting out of Casco Bay, Malkovich hopping into his Outback and speeding toward Portsmouth.

Lickety split. Bad luck, Kate…

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Know the Ropes”

Wendy Webster was a friend of the family.

That was how she knew all about the so-called “ripped blade.” The sword had been in and out of the family for generations, in and out of pawn shops, up and down the coastline, whipped about like a Nor’easter, a local legend, really, but only among those who knew, and that wasn’t much of anyone, really, outside of the family, and all those collectors, constantly disappointed.

Honestly, when Wendy had first heard about what happened to Kate, she assumed it had something to do with the sword even before it came up. When it became just a curiosity, a footnote, a bizarre term to hang the whole thing on, Wendy kept it clearly in her crosshairs.

She began asking around, too. She discovered that all the infamous kidnap victims from the past had had possession of the sword at some point, or someone in their families, anyway, and Wendy wasn’t much one to believe in coincidences.

She worried what would become of it. Kate’s mother-in-law asked Wendy the likelihood of reclaiming it at some point. Wendy was one for pessimism, too. She believed it would be locked up in some evidence box (a long one!) for years to come.

When they gathered for meals, these days, at the Muddy Rudder, talk was rife with allusions to the sword. Some at the table had the good sense to at least appear guilty about it.

Wendy sometimes wondered about the damned thing’s origins. She hoped it was all worth it. She always had tissue packs with her, these days. She told herself it was for Kate Meadows.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Jaws of Death”

Matt White was the other neighbor.

Matt was the one who got the bum of that particular deal. Matt had actually known Kate Meadows, and he very much preferred not to talk about it. He wasn’t going to be allowed such privilege.

He found himself constantly interviewed. He considered it an invasion of privacy, even if, in the early days, it might’ve helped Kate. The thing was, as he’d tried so hard to make clear, was that it couldn’t possibly have helped.

The Kate he knew had been terribly unhappy. He’d been perfectly happy to listen, whenever she came over. He knew she needed to vent. Sometimes he wished he knew how to help. Sometimes he’d feared there was nothing he could do, except listen. Sometimes he wondered if he could’ve tried harder.

After the body was found, that third option? That was all he thought about.

His opinion, the one thing he kept to himself, was that she’d done it herself. All of it. She’d used a couple of local idiots to confuse the situation, successfully, but in the end, she killed herself.

Matt didn’t particularly care to speculate about all the details, how she’d done it, especially that business with the sword. Nasty, horrible, not anything he wanted to think about, so of course the world insisted on nothing else.

Matt really just wanted to move, now, find a fresh start. Maybe all the way out of state. He’d never lived anywhere but Berlin.

He also knew such a gesture would be futile. He’d never be able to leave Kate Meadows behind. He’d need to make peace with it. He owed her, after all. It was just, it was a heavy debt indeed…

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “It’s Not All It’s Cracked Up To Be”

Barnaby Wise had one of those local access shows. Every market has them, and hardly anyone watches them, but I really doesn’t matter, does it? Barnaby was practically a kid, but he’d been watching the late night talk shows all his young life, and Up Late with Barnaby Wise was patterned after them as closely as he could manage.

All of them had been following the same basic pattern for decades. Barnaby opened his shows with jokes riffing on the headlines. That’s how he got into the Kate Meadows business. For him it was local news.  By a very great coincidence he’d actually grown up in Berlin,  before,  like a lot of other folks, relocating to Portland, where he filmed at the Maine Public Broadcasting studio. He always had a canned audience, a band leader on a cue he found with a button he could press discreetly under his desk, and a backdrop that conveniently evoked the same seaside everyone now so interested in the Meadows case expected.

He found new interest, too. In truth, Barney wasn’t that talented. He was passable. His jokes were lazy, in exactly the way a lot of people claimed much more famous and talented folks to be. His viewers didn’t care. I mean, they did. A lot of them snickered. But they watched.

Barney tended to accept the traditional narrative. Of course he did. He generally believed he was free from any litigation given the public nature of the material. Over the ensuing months he discovered he was wrong. The viewing numbers helped assuage such problems. 

He’d never really had a running joke before. He discovered he loved it. 

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Head Over Heels”

Dale Salvage was the name a lot of people stumbled on, in the years to come. He’d written a book about Kate Meadows. If you did the right kind of internet search, his was one of the names most likely to come up, aside from Meadows herself, Bishop, Malkovich…He was one of the proponents of the Vinokur connection, the mob connection. He also drafted in Mossad (of course), Russia (of course!), even China, even Cuba, the CIA…In short, all the usual suspects. Dale Salvage was a conspiracy theorist.

His book was called Head Over Heels, and it posited that Meadows had been a spook, and been involved in any number of cases, that Bishop had been her handler, that Malkovich had ties, at the very least, to the Kremlin, and that all the secrets were going to be exposed if she’d been allowed to live…

Of course. Of course! Did Dale believe any of it? Of course not! But he had an audience willing to believe all of it. He’d connected all the usual suspects, after all. He threw numbers at it that couldn’t be verified and had therefore been accepted immediately by the more militant believers. Both sides of the political spectrum in the States claimed he belonged to the other side, was symbolic of everything that was wrong with the country…

Oh, did you also want to know where Dale stands in Kennedy? Friend, that’s a different book entirely. Actually, several. The internet attests!

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Go For Broke”

Emily Bowman had been Kate Meadows’ neighbor.

She’d been Kate’s neighbor for years, in fact. She told a lot of people, that, in the days that followed. She told more, later, than before the kidnapping, before the murder (although, Emily supposed, it had never been a kidnapping in the first place, really, probably, although she was far sketchier on the details of the case than the many memories she managed to convincingly manufacture about her dear neighbor Kate Meadows), all about Kate. A lot of people became convinced they’d been best friends. In fact, Emily’s actual friends, her family, even casual acquaintances, none of them would’ve ever heard about Kate Meadows, from Emily, before.

Well, that hardly mattered, right?

Emily became very important indeed, in the wake of all that followed. Everyone wanted to talk to her, and she was very happy to talk to them. A lot of things changed about her. Her hair, for one. Her ability to spontaneously break into laughter. She suddenly spoke with the Maine accent, which for the previous…forever, she would never have been caught dead using. Too provincial, she’d previously asserted. Not that anyone called her out on it.

O, that Kate! 

That, by the way, was a phrase frequently to be found uttered by Emily. Everyone who listened to her, if they’d consulted, would’ve discovered they’d heard her utter it.

It got to Emily actually beginning to believe her own well-intentioned lies. It got to be pretty expensive, hosting so many guests, though. That she didn’t mind admitting. That was another thing people might remember her mentioning.

Not that anyone paid too much attention. That was the only part that bothered her. Well, that and wondering if she might actually know anything useful about what’d happened. She didn’t, of course.

A to Z Challenge 2025 - The Ripped Blade: “Foaming at the Mouth”

Denton Field, not that he really cared to brag, was kind of a big deal.

Readers across the southern regions of Maine had been reading him for years in the pages of The Notes. Denton was one of a number of columnists providing local color. Denton himself tended to specialize in Maine humor, the downhome charm that was easy, for locals, to identify with the state. He’d grown up in Lisbon Falls, Maine, where he’d apprenticed under John Gould in the pages of the Enterprise, until he set new roots in Freeport, and took request lighthearted shots at L.L.Bean culture, among other favorite topics.

He received a letter, one day, asking if he’d heard about the Kate Meadows case. Of course he had. Everyone had. But it hadn’t come up in his column because, well, he didn’t find much funny about it. 

He set the letter aside and forgot about it, but later, he found himself thinking about it, and coincidentally, he was struggling to come up with material for the next piece, so that was why he wrote about Kate Meadows for the first time.

That first piece was lighthearted, the same tone as everything else he’d written over the years, approaching the topic from the reliable vantage point of out-of-state vacationers. He conjured visitors asking him about the case, always sticking their noses in business that didn’t concern them, unlike all the tacky gift shops decorating the state, the yard sales, the restaurants full of lobster…

That one garnered an unprecedented response. Denton was ready to dismiss it, but a niggling thought inserted itself into his brain. Just write another one just like it. This is what he did. The response was even bigger, and far less complementary. He sensed it was impatience, to put it mildly. Folks just wanted reassurance. 

From there he took a more serious approach. Denton began to fancy himself a journalist for the first time. The responses began labeling him a crusader. He was less sure how he felt about that.

He worried. At the diner he felt eyes on him laced with silence and suspicion. The waitress took longer to refill his coffee. 

Denton looked at the new piece he’d written. He could no longer remember the last time he’d written about something other than Kate Meadows. He didn’t recognize a single word he’d written. He was deeply unhappy. He might as well be down in Boston writing for the Herald. Actually, he wondered, just then, if they would hire him. Then he wondered how much they’d written about Kate Meadows. He was practically the expert at this point.

And he’d become completely anonymous.

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. 

New Danab Cycle Short, farewell to Kindle Vella...

I just completed a new Danab Cycle short over at Sigild V, Soldiers of Ancient Seas, which serves as a prequel to the, um, Earth prequel to the, err, Earth prequel to everything that's going to...

Listen, I know this kind of sounds complicated.  I dreamed up all of this many years ago, and've been further developing and expanding the stories I wanted to tell along the way.  Originally it was what has since been entitled Collider, which is the real winner in finishing Soldiers, since it's fully my intention to make finally writing Collider the major project of the year, only oh some three decades in the making.  But the first book I actually wrote was Seven Thunders, which for years I thought, if there was only going to be one book actually written, that was going to be it, but in the years since, just trying to find a publisher, I really have expanded my ambitions.  I plotted out many books before I really got to thinking about the kinds of stories that needed to be told, and so I plotted a couple of prequels, one that revolves around the war that begins all this, and the other about the events that set all this in motion in the first place...

Soldiers is actually a bridge between them.  It's also the first time I've posted a serialized story (comic book scripting excepted)  at the writing blog in years, having in recent years devoted such efforts to Kindle Vella or entirely offline (what a thought!).  Kindle Vella (and I guess I ought to include Wattpad, where I first used an alternative platform, and I walked away from long ago at this point) closed up shop and is officially winding down and taking down content in a handful of days, I'll forever be grateful for, as it somehow provoked me to write stories that I would never have written, lastly A Most Excellent Fancy last year.

Fancy, in my personal files, now incorporates the footnotes the platform encouraged users to include, in the traditional footnote format (which, honestly, if nothing else I'm certainly happy to have been able to do), which I hope I can figure out how to include in a file Kindle itself will allow me to publish in paperback later.  I still have a backlog of material waiting, including the short story collection I'm including Soldiers.  If I can pull off the footnotes I'll be very happy indeed.  

Anyway, ever onward...

I think Pat Dilloway is dead…

I think Patrick “Pat” “P.T.” “Eric Filler” (etc.) Dilloway is dead.

This will come as a surprise to anyone with a small inkling at how exasperated he made me for a lot of the time I knew him in this blogging community. Don’t worry if you had no clue about that. If he’s dead, it literally can’t possibly matter anymore.

I met Pat during the 2012 Blogging A to Z Challenge. I chose his blog among the listed entrants because he was writing about a superhero book he’d written. For several years afterward I was a regular visitor to his blog, and my biggest blogging claim to fame is arguably successfully participating in his original box office challenge. 

As the opening line suggests, Pat used a lot of aliases, and probably most of the people who knew him online or through his many books had no idea. 

He went radio silent before the new year. His last post on his blog was at the start of December. There are bloggers who take breaks, but usually they’ll post about it. A lot of bloggers became considerably more sporadic over recent years, and many outright walked away. I didn’t expect Pat to do anything like that, or certainly not anytime soon. I thought he was just slowing down.

A post I saw when I tried to look up any possible activity elsewhere, on a Wordpress blog Pat maintained for Eric Filler, suggests he was battling cancer last year. He never mentioned this on his Dilloway blog. 

All considered, if you’re dead, rest in peace, dude.

The Children’s Crusade didn’t make the shortlist…

So New Directions finally announced its shortlist for its novel contest, and The Children’s Crusade wasn’t on it. I’m not overly surprised, but it would’ve been nice. I guess I’ve never pursued real publication seriously, and I’m about as far from the publishing world as you can get. They wouldn’t know what to do with me, y’know? But I love writing. I’ve got a huge backlog of material waiting to upload into new paperbacks, which, lately, I was kind of holding off on in the absurd case it might hurt my chances. While also releasing that twentieth anniversary edition of that one book (the physical copy of which I finally got in the mail!)…

It’s cool. In years past losing out on things like this put me in a terrible funk. I’m going to try not to let that happen. We’ll see! 

The reward here was having written it. And knowing I’ve got plenty left in the tank.

Not-the-Tonys 2025

 Look at me actually keeping up with this in consecutive years!  This time it's even more self-serving, as I also want to have content for this blog, which can sometimes seem a little neglected.  Anyway!

MOVIES

My favorite movie of 2024 ended up turning out to be A Complete Unknown, which helped explain the rest of why Bob Dylan has been such a fascinating adult discovery for me, a little like if Yesterday really had explored one dude inexplicably writing a bunch of genius songs one after the other with no effort...because that's really what Bob Dylan's done all his life.  Also heavily in the mix, Conclave, which pleasantly is another critically-acclaimed movie I also happen to have loved, which doesn't happen overly often these days.

BOOKS

My favorite book of the year was also, coincidentally, a critically acclaimed (read: Nobel Prize for Literature) work, Jon Fosse's Septology, which I read after learning about its dubbing, hoping to find another great work of literature, and I did.  That was gratifying!

MUSIC

This one's kind of tough unless I cheat and just pick a song: Billy Joel's "Turn the Lights Back On."

My brother long identified himself as a huge Billy Joe fan, and by extension I listened to a lot of his music and then became a pretty big fan myself, which was immeasurably gratifying (apparently the word of the year) when he dropped this new song at the start of the year, a career statement unlike but similar to what Johnny Cash did with "Hurt."  Brilliant video.  Among albums from favorite artists, Vampire Weekend's Only God Was Above Us probably proved most satisfying, but I was really spoiled for new additions to my collection.  

TV

Ghosts, the CBS version, continues to be my favorite show, but I did finally finished a complete watch for the original BBC version.  I also caught up on 1883 and 1923, the Yellowstone prequels, and finally got to watch some of Disenchantment, the Matt Groening Netflix show that came and went, and I think deserves the same kind of cult following as Futurama.  

WRITING PROJECTS

I wrote The Children's Crusade at the start of the year, which turned out to be, well, gratifying.  I hope to write Collider this year and if I'm really ambitious And A Centaur Died. but certainly next year.  It all depends on how things turn out!  There were other things I wrote throughout the year, and plenty of things I'll tackle this year, too.  2024 was also a kind of 20th anniversary for my first novel, and I celebrated that by issuing a long-awaited new edition, which I'm still waiting on Amazon to ship the copies I've ordered.  Kindle Direct Publishing has had a hardcover option for a couple of years now.  I wonder if it's still a bit more complicated than Amazon thinks.

FAMILY

I was fortunate to again have two family vacation experiences in 2024, one once again with the Burrito and her ever-expanding family (new baby sister! new dog!), and then later a whole family reunion, which hadn't happened since 2015 (which, not incidentally, also marks this year as the decade anniversary of my mom's death, which is astonishing), in which I got to catch up with my nephews up in Maine, since I stayed with them for the trip.

WORK

The job was a series of unfortunate complications throughout the year, starting with an awful nasty experience I'm certainly not discussing here (even a personal writer's blog, for me, doesn't have room for such things), but happily, there were plenty of happy babies and other assorted young youth I had the privilege to spend time with, and during one of two rounds of inspections I got singled out for praise, so that was (you guessed it) gratifying.