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    The Mystery
    The Mystery
    The Mystery
    Ebook94 pages1 hour

    The Mystery

    By Joyce McDonald Hoskins

    ()

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    About this ebook

    After his wife dies, Charles Fritzpatrick, moves to a retirement community. A veteran of WWII and a retired police reporter, Fritz feels his life is concluding. When he joins a critique group and begins writing his memoirs, he stumbles onto clues to a cold case. With renewed vigor, he follows the  clues to an unsuspected conclusion. The interest in writing, investigating a cold case, and meeting a lady, changes Fritz’s outlook and he learns you are never too old to have an adventure or a romance.

    This is a small tightly knit novella.  

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJoyce McDonald Hoskins
    Release dateJul 31, 2017
    ISBN9781540105042
    The Mystery

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      Book preview

      The Mystery - Joyce McDonald Hoskins

      Journal Entry: Evening

      The Palm Frond Retirement Community

      I laughed when I overheard these words yesterday. Blog it, post it, tweet it, or it didn’t happen. I thought it was rather silly. But now I’m doing it. And believe me, what follows did happen.

      They say your memory gets dull as you age. Mine is as sharp as ever. Decades, stored in my mind, like old diaries and photo albums.

      Tonight, I’ve been thinking about Grace. There are some women who always have a man. Always. Grace was one of them. Even when she was old, men flocked around her. Hell, Grace was never old. She still danced in stiletto heels when she was in her late seventies.

      I met her in 1945 when I returned to the states. Happy to be home and alive, I went a little wild, as many of us did. We’d seen too much death, lost too many buddies, and felt far too much pain. Partying too much beat sitting in a military hospital, shell-shocked.

      They want me to go to bed now, but the nurse nodded and left when I told her I’m working on my autobiography. In truth, it will probably be a biography of Grace’s life. She was married four times, Grace was, and never to me. Much to my regret, and perhaps to hers. Yes, she asked me once why we never married.

      The Palm Frond writer’s group will pick my few paragraphs apart tomorrow. Tell me I’ll never get published if I continue to use too many toos. Damn, it’s hard to have a good laugh when there’s no one left to share it.

      Grace, Martin, Abe, Colleen and I, now we were a critique group. Martin’s political satires brought home the bacon, too bad his ticker stopped before he finished that novel. What did he title it, White House, Black Sin? No. Right idea, wrong words. Happens a lot nowadays. Minds still shape, but perhaps a little slow. It’ll come to me later. Abe, wrote a damn good sports column. He managed to get his book on baseball published. Sold well, but had him in court until the day he died. Colleen’s children’s books are still in the bookstores. Me? The one book wonder and it never published. The local police reporter with a file full of rejection slips. The rags never objected to my toos. Hell, maybe if I take out about a hundred toos and resubmit, it will float. Ha. Fat chance. And why should I care? I’ll not be here much longer, anyhow.

      Sign off and go to sleep old boy.

      ––––––––

      Journal Entry: Morning

      The Palm Frond Retirement Community

      So, the group says I need to write either a journal or a novel, that I can’t do both in one book. Why the hell can’t I? If you can’t do as you bloody well please in your nineties, when the hell can you? I’d stop going to the group, except they’d probably send the shrink around to see why I withdrew.

      After all, I suffer through the reading of their cookbooks, granny antidotes, and pet stories, so I’ll write, my way. And I will read this part, too. Yes, too, is my favorite adverb/adjective. And I’ll concede, most of the stories and even the recipes are pretty darn good. We’ve all lived long enough to give each other hell, and not take offense. No, I won’t quit the group.

      Several people in the group pointed out, and rightfully so, that I didn’t say what Grace wrote. Poetry. So like her that I neglected to mention it. She wrote passionately, with no thought or desire of publication. She put her poems in small books with clapboard fronts, gave them away to friends, and sometimes strangers. She took the time to paint the covers. Herbs. Birds. Flowers. Butterflies. Always delicate and lovely. Of course. 

      Journal Entry: Evening

      The Palm Frond Retirement Community

      Grace’s grandson, Brandon, came today. He has her platinum hair and he writes. Yes, the boy writes and he writes well. His grandfather was her first husband, Hector, the college professor. They met when she took his philosophy course, but he was too ethical to ask her out until the course was completed. They married two weeks later. I was, as I was for her future weddings, the best man. I didn’t know him, but she insisted. As it turned out, I never got to know him well, he died before Brandon’s father was born. Brandon’s father was named for me, Charles, but he’s always been called Chase.

      So, Brandon came in with a gizmo he calls a flash drive. Stuck it in my computer and up popped my novel. Asked if I remembered how to do a word search and suggested I look for words I might have overworked. He thought I might want to start with too. Said if I do some editing and rewriting he’d show it to an agent that is shopping some of his work. Don’t know who would be interested in The Police Reporter’s Beat, nowadays, but what else do I have to do? Maybe, I can freshen it up a bit. Nothing to lose. Good kid, Brandon. He’s my godson, as is his father. Grace insisted.

      You’ve probably figured out by now that I loved her. Not like I loved my wife, Suzette. It was a different love that Grace and I shared. Suzette knew. Fortunately, she understood. Maybe it was because she was French, maybe not. I really don’t know why, but she did, perhaps better than Grace or I.

      But, I digress, as older people are known to do. Shit, the truth is, I’ve always rambled. Always. When I came back from the war, I got a job in the newsroom writing the police reports. I got a title, Police Reporter, and almost enough money to buy cigarettes. We all smoked in those days. The newsroom looked like a smokehouse most of the time. Fortunately, I was living back home with Mom and Dad, so I didn’t starve. Anyhow, the editor always yelled at me for rambling. All I was supposed to do was go to the

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