In Book 6 of the Frank Nagler Mysteries, NAGLER’S SECRET, a work in progress, there was an event in September 1994 that is at the heart of the secret that left Detective Frank Nagler shaken.
There is also a young woman who reappeared in Ironton, N.J. many years later.
Does she know the secret?
Detective Frank Nagler’s friends try to recall her:
“She had brown hair, cut short,” said Barry, the diner owner. “She’d come in after the first rush, order tea and unbuttered toast with jam. She always seemed to be looking for somebody. Never connected her to that thing on Bastion. You’d look and she’d be gone, couple bucks on the counter.”
“How old do you think she was?” Dawson asked.
Barry squinted, thinking, and scratched his chin. “Just a kid, early twenties. Something about her face. It would have been beautiful if her eyes weren’t so hard.”
“Ever see her with Nagler, or did she say anything?”
“No,” Barry said. “Other than ordering tea and toast, she said nothing. Had a soft, scratchy voice.”
Calista Knox said she’d change her appearance depending on what she was trying to get.
“I have some experience with that, becoming someone else depending on what hustle I was running. Because that’s what she was, Jimmy, a hustler. Sometimes she was a blonde with dark streaks and her hair was untamed, wispy, shoulder length. A red head, a shag cut, a ponytail, a 70’s bouffant.”
“And a scarf, I noticed that,” Barry said. “Sometimes silk and sort of stylish, maybe fine cotton or wool wrapped around her neck once then draped all artsy over a shoulder.” Barry flipped his hand over his right shoulder to demonstrate how the girl wore her scarf. “But always a scarf.”
Leonard could only recall her voice. That’s how a blind man remembers everyone, that and sound of their footsteps.
“Barry was right, Her voice was soft and scratchy, but full. Sometimes whimsical, and I’d imagine her face as round and soft with full mouth. But then it would change and become hard and threatening. She’d be in the middle of a story about her childhood in a light, happy voice, then something would rise up, probably a stray memory, and her voice would grow dark and she’s stop telling it, and walk away. There was some hollowness in her voice that made me think those childhood stories were not of her childhood, but of someone else’s, or were completely made up. I often wondered what she was trying to tell me.”
Calista said, “She presented to each person what they wanted to see. That’s what survivors do. She was a survivor.”
In the end, the only thing that they could agree on was that she was a small woman with an athletic figure.
Dawson flipped through his notebooks. His own description: “She was wearing a sleeveless flowered dress, with a wrist full of bangles. Her shoulders were tanned and toned and arms rippled with strength resulting from hard work. She had a piercing dark stare that drilled through you from a pixie face; she never took her eyes off yours. probing, daring, inviting, blocking, all at the same time. Her eyes never softened, even when she laughed, because the laugh was not mirthful, but knowing. When she laughed she was telling you that you had work to do to get to know her. Her laugh was not a response to something funny or casually entertaining, but was itself a question.”
They had met in odd places, at odd times. It was like arranging the release of an American spy from the Russians. Agreements had been made. Secrets would not be told.
Five meetings over a year.
He never expected to see her again.
The award-winning Frank Nagler Mysteries are: THE SWAMPS OF JERSEY; A GAME CALLED DEAD; THE WEIGHT OF LIVING; THE RED HAND; and DRAGONY RISING.
They are available online at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, Kobo and Walmart.com. Also at Book and Puppet in downtown Easton, Pa.
