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.