I’m a famous mystery novelist, power-walking enthusiast, and spunky widow who, despite my husband’s death, has not had my joie de vivre diminished in the slightest. Meeting me, perhaps you’d surmise that I’m a glass-half-full kind of gal who loves socializing, travel, and dinner with an ever-widening coterie of friends.
You’d be wrong. To make the most of my twilight years, I’ve cultivated a detached numbness to death that would give the grizzliest veteran of Guadalcanal the thousand-yard stare. This is because the people I’ve known have been murdered so often that I don’t feel anything anymore, not even when I find the dead body myself.
Nothing.
Well, perhaps that’s not true. I feel—it’s not quite excitement. It’s like when you leaf through the paltry reading material at the dentist’s office, and you discover that someone has neglected to fill out the People Magazine crossword puzzle. So, I’m keeping busy, but I basically feel nothing.
Not even when my nephew Grady gets framed for murder, which happens constantly. Seriously, I have a criminal defense attorney on perpetual retainer who specializes in homicide for this sort of thing. At this point, the police department just calls me first, so we can clear it up.
He’s a sweet boy, and I dote on him despite his terrible taste in romantic partners. Grady’s always introducing me to this girl or that one. They seem nice enough with big ’80s hair and winning smiles, but I can see it, and I tell him honestly that there’s no future. Each of those relationships will more likely than not end just like the others, with him framed for her murder.
Speaking of which, I tell Grady over and over to keep his fingerprints off the murder weapon when he discovers the body, but he’s like a kid in a candy store when he sees a bloody dagger in someone’s back: he’s got to have it.
Again, let me emphasize that I’m a nice old lady who feels nothing about the parade of murder that seems to follow me. Want some evidence? One time, the police called to congratulate me on my hunch because they found my friend Gwen from the museum committee dead in a drainpipe.
So many people have been murdered that I now travel quite the distance from my home in Cabot Cove, a quaint Maine town that has more murders per capita than anywhere else in the county. Just last month, I traveled to Hong Kong to see a ceramicist friend I met at a UNESCO arts festival. We hit it off immediately, so she invited me to see her home. During my time there, she was kidnapped, and her husband was poisoned. It was a great trip—the Jades were remarkable.
For many older adults, especially as they get up there, all their friends are in the cemetery—dead of dementia, heart disease, or various cancers. Mine are gone from poisonings, gunshot wounds, and hangings deliberately staged to look like suicide to throw suspicion off of the real killer.
That’s why I keep such a full social calendar. It’s not just to keep the old gray matter sharp but also to add more people to my circle of charming but often blackmailable friends and acquaintances who end up on the slab. And when I invite someone to Bridge Club because a spot has opened, no one ever asks why.
