Semi-dressed, Liz made her way to the kitchen to start some coffee brewing before she took her shower. Without her eyeglasses, she saw little. But she was not so blind that she could not see the pair of legs, visible from the knees down, which filled the small window over her kitchen sink. She had not thought to close the blinds on the previous evening.
“You startled me, Tom!” she said at the top of her lungs. But the man whose legs she saw did not hear her through the double-glazed windows she’d had installed to cut down on the traffic noise.
She rapped on the window and then lifted it a few inches.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, startling Tom in turn.
“Jeez! You scared me!” Tom said as his long-waisted torso, chest, shoulders, and head came into sight in that order.
“You startled me, too. It’s not billboard day,” Liz said, opening the coffee canister. Tom regularly changed the billboard advertisements beginning on the first Tuesday of the month, spending an average three days per billboard change. This was the third Tuesday of December.
“I know, but a car dealer wants to make end-of-the-year sales, so I’m putting up a new ad before the month ends. The dealer must have money to burn. I don’t think this ad will be up as long as two weeks. Don’t get me wrong,” Tom said, grinning at Liz’s bare legs. “I’m not complaining.”
Liz shut the blinds on his smile, pulled on some slacks, and then opened the blinds again.
“Tom Horton at your service!” he grinned.
“Cup of coffee?” she said.
“Sure thing!”
“It’ll have to be quick,” Liz said, giving up on taking a shower. “I’m on assignment this morning. I’ve gotta get out to Worcester.”
Tom cleaned his boots on the doormat with care before entering.
“I can really use that coffee,” he said. “It’s cold enough to . . .”
“. . . freeze the balls off a brass monkey,” they said in unison, laughing. Over the year that Liz had lived below the billboard, she and Tom had enjoyed quite a few cups of coffee. The first time, she’d invited him in out of pity. Hanging an ad in below-freezing temperatures, he had muttered that same line only to look down and see Liz gazing up at him.
“It sure is!” she had said. “Don’t be embarrassed,” she’d added, when she saw his sheepish expression. “The phrase doesn’t mean what you think it does, so I’m not offended. Come on in and have a cup of coffee and I’ll tell you where it comes from.”
He’d wiped his boots thoroughly then, too. And he’d said, “I can sure use this coffee.”
And when Liz told him the crude-sounding expression was actually a sailor’s turn of phrase, he said, “That doesn’t surprise me. Sailors can turn the air blue with their cussing.”
“No, no! It’s not what you think,” Liz had said. “Sailors didn’t say that to be foul. On old warships, the ‘monkey’ was the platform that held the stack of cannon balls. It was made of brass. When the temperature was low enough, the brass monkey contracted, allowing the cannonballs to roll off it.”
“Yeah, sure!”
“No, really. Look, I’ll show you,” she had insisted, opening a well-worn copy of Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.
“Well, I’ll be! Are you some kind of professor?”
“No, I’m a reporter for the Beantown Banner. And I’m a word nut. That’s why I have all these dictionaries.”
Now, as the reporter and the billboard hanger laughed over the expression again, Tom said, “I’m sorry to tell you that expression about the brass monkey is just an urban legend. Cannonballs were never stored on deck like that. I saw it on the Internet.”
“I always believe a published reference book over the Internet,” Liz said. “In my line of work, I have seen too much misleading material on the Web. By the way, whose ad are you hanging over my head this time?”
“Maksoud’s,” he said. “The car dealership over on Needham Street. I hear they’ve got such an overstock, they’re practically giving cars away. I guess old man Maksoud wants to drum up some business quick. Hey, look, you’d better get going. Didn’t you say you had to get over to Worcester this morning?”
“That’s right,” Liz said, tucking a fresh reporter’s notebook into her purse. “I’ll see you out.”
Chapter 4
Liz made the fifty-minute drive without incident and arrived at the Worcester Public Library with time to spare. That meant she could take a look at the Boston World. Passing through the etched-glass sliding doors that formed a pleasing entry to the large building, she went straight to the Periodicals Room. Fortunately, the library stocked several copies of both the Banner and the World. While every copy of the Banner had been snatched up by readers, three copies of the competing paper remained on the rack.
The World was a well-named publication, since it prided itself on its international coverage. Its lead story’s headline read, “No Room at the Inn for Bosnian Refugees.” Apparently, the World’s editors did not even think their lead story deserved full upper-case type. The article at the bottom of their front page bore an even more reserved headline, “Newton Police Mull Missing Mother Case.”
The Banner’s big, bold “COOKIE MONSTER” headline had done a better job of grabbing readers. Still, Mick Lichen had reported a fact that Liz and Manning had missed.
“Ellen was not the only thing missing from the Johansson household. Her newly purchased Honda Civic was also gone from the drive of the family home in this low-crime neighborhood,” Lichen had written.
“Hey, aren’t you the gal in this picture?” an elderly reader asked, looking at Liz over the edge of the Banner.
“That would be me,” Liz admitted.
“How come you’re way out here in Worcester?” the old man inquired. “Do you think you’ll find a body in the library?” he chuckled.
“Maybe not a body, but information about it,” Liz said, looking at the line-up of conference guests that was posted on the Periodical Room’s bulletin board. Apparently, mystery writers used more than their imaginations to turn out their thrillers. On the roster were Mary Higgins Clark, mystery writer; Dr. Cormac Kinnaird, M.D., forensic pathologist; Pamela Nesnarf, private investigator; and Maurice E. Bouvard, Boston World literary editor. Not for the first time, Liz wondered whether it was World muckety-mucks or Maurice himself who decided to term Bouvard “literary editor,” instead of endowing him with the more prosaic title “book review editor.”
“Ah, the lovely Liz Higgins,” Bouvard said as she entered the reception room where the Friends of the Worcester Public Library were serving coffee and homemade cookies to conference participants. “I see the Banner’s bookworm Rose Morgan is not here to dazzle us with her literary insights. Such a pity.”
“Alas!” Liz said, playing along. “Our book review editor is not among the speakers. But I have no doubt you will wow the crowd, Maurice.”
“Too bad your editors will eschew using any reports you might wish to make upon my words of wisdom.”
“Verily, they may. But surely the World will quote you at generous length.”
“Ah, there’s the rub. They’ve got everyone working on that breaking news in Newton. The missing mom, you know.”