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.