HELL'S HALF ACRE a gripping murder mystery full of twists (Coffin Cove Mysteries Book 2) by JACKIE ELLIOTT (classic literature books .txt) 📗

It wasn’t until Dennis and Sandra Havers, his parents, exerted some family influence over a senior member of the RCMP, that they dispatched Andi’s old friend, Inspector Andrew Vega, to Coffin Cove to “oversee” a thorough investigation. He too found nothing. Ricky Havers was gone, and the only thing to do was wait until he turned up.

Dead or alive.

Andi was now convinced of two things. First, Ricky’s plight involved foul play. Second, the new mayor, Jade Thompson, who’d unseated Dennis Havers a few months after his son’s disappearance, knew more about Ricky than she was letting on.

Andi had no proof of this. She was relying on a few small clues and her gut instinct. Andrew Vega and Jim Peters had been quick to point this out. Usually that wouldn’t have stopped her. But the problem was, she was worried her gut instinct was not reliable. Not at the moment, anyway.

There was one person who thought Andi could solve the mystery, though, and that was Sandra Havers, Ricky’s distraught mother. Andi had given her word she’d continue investigating Ricky’s disappearance, especially when Sandra handed her some intriguing information. So now, despite her horrible night, Andi had made a promise and now she needed to get out of bed and get on with her job.

* * *

The Coffin Cove Gazette had moved from a tiny run-down office on the outskirts of town to a “suite of spacious modern work spaces overlooking the ocean”. At least, that’s how the landlord had advertised it, and although Jim Peters had discovered that the roof leaked when it rained hard, and only one wall heater worked properly, at least he had his own space now. And the new office, updated computer equipment and stylish office furniture signified an upturn in business.

Jim Peters had inherited the Gazette from his father. An anomaly in Coffin Cove back in the seventies, he’d always had wanted to be in the newspaper business. Instead of heading to the mill or a fishing boat when he left school, he went to university and got a degree in journalism. He came back to Coffin Cove to work with his father, but his new wife disliked Coffin Cove and left Jim alone to raise their young son. Paul went off the rails when he was a teenager, and when he left home, Jim left too. For a couple of decades he worked for national and international media organizations, reporting the news from around the globe. He returned to Coffin Cove when it was apparent that both the Gazette and his father were in ailing health.

Jim, a small, slender man, leaned back in his office chair, clasping and unclasping his fingers, as he always did when he was thinking.

The Gazette had undoubtedly profited from last summer’s tragedy. The murder of a prominent activist, the uncovering of a decades-old murder of a local young woman, all against the backdrop of a conflict between the working men of Coffin Cove’s traditional resource industry and environmental protestors . . . Well, if that wasn’t a great story, Jim didn’t know what was.

Andi had investigated and written a series of captivating articles that put the independent Gazette on the map and earned both Jim and the paper a good payday. Since then, Jim had shaken off numerous offers to buy the business from regional media organizations. He had launched an online version of the paper and even had a social media strategy.

All was good from that point of view, but great stories came at a cost — and in this case, two people were dead. The inhabitants of Coffin Cove had been shaken by the events, and Jim knew that Andi had suffered over the last year. He had to push her to turn in an article a week.

He sighed. Andi was talented. But she’d become obsessed by the disappearance of a local man a few months before.

Jim trusted Andi’s nose for a story when she was functioning at full capacity. But he was worried about her recent investigations. Jim hadn’t intended to snoop — at least that’s what he told himself when he was picking the lock on Andi’s desk drawer. Careful not to disturb the contents, he flicked through the hanging files until he came to one marked “Havers” and another labelled “Thompson”. He pulled them both out and found Andi’s usual thorough work. The Havers file contained archived articles, yearbook photographs and scribbled notes about the Havers family and Dennis’s tenure as mayor. All as Jim expected. Andi wrote several articles about Dennis during his recent re-election bid, and he expected her to do her homework. The Thompson file was considerably thinner. Andi was right about one thing, Jim thought: Jade Thompson was a bit of an enigma.

Jim leaned back in the chair again.

There was nothing here to link Ricky Havers with Jade Thompson. They’d attended the same school in Coffin Cove, but Ricky was a few years older than Jade. She’d been a serious-looking, plain little thing with big round glasses. In his day, Jim thought, they’d have called her a swot. After graduation, she’d left Coffin Cove and gone to university on the mainland. After that, she’d worked her way up the corporate ladder in a big property development company. Ricky, on the other hand, was a jock. He’d played football and excelled at baseball. There was even one article about a national team scout inviting Ricky to a summer baseball camp for rising stars. It hadn’t come to anything. Ricky never left Coffin Cove, and to all accounts, he’d only left his parents’ basement a few months before he disappeared. Ricky hadn’t held down a job since he’d left school. Dennis Havers had been exasperated by his only son and didn’t make a secret of it, Jim recalled. Ricky was lazy, entitled and did little